The Terra Incognita Affair: Prologue and Section I
by Gmku
Summary: Berlin. Dreadful. That old microcosm of the Cold War. Among its leftover ruins and blistered facades, two U.N.C.L.E. agents begin their long journey into the dark heart of a mystery they dread to uncover: Did Illya Kuryakin kill Napoleon Solo? April Dancer joins the Russian agent in a desperate search for answers inside Soviet bloc Europe.
1. Chapter 1

1

 _R_

by

Gary Kuhlmann

R

He could feel the heat closing in, could feel them out there making their moves, threading their way through the city, buzzing over the special gadgets he discarded in a restroom stall at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He vaulted turnstiles, up two flights of concrete stairs off the Lex and onto a Lower East Side sidewalk. Guns and sirens pierced the night. He was sick, nauseated and sweating. His feet, hot and aching, screaming for a rest, were finished. His calves and thighs cried for an end to the running.

Where was he? Footsteps and the curses of men taunted the corners of the night. A fluid seemed to envelop him. The place was a fluid that enveloped him, that breathed in through his nostrils like cigarette smoke, some substrata swimming beneath a cityscape moon shining steady and opaque, smooth and fecundating.

Jumping from a fat dark sedan that had pulled to a stop curbside with a screech, a young, pretty and trim, redhead, tennis court beauty. Her figure fit for haute couture; not too long ago no doubt adorning herself with the latest mod clothes from England, miniskirts and go-go boots. He was evidently her idea of a suspicious type.

"Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin!"

Her hand slipped inside black leather. Rectangles of metal and glass slid by, cold, cruelly metallic traffic that emphasized the delicious delirium of her blouse against the alabaster flesh of her body. He could observe their reflection, ghosts reversed in a world of diffused light and fluorescent highlights.

Her hand slid back out of her leather coat, and she brought the black circle of a pistol barrel up even with a point between his eyes. She dismissed his bewilderment with a terse summary.

"Procedure," she advised him, matter-of-factly.

SECTION I : _"Anything Else for the Good of the Cause to Which We Are All So Devoted?"_

 _Somewhere in New York City, Nov. 3, 1971_

Ringing. Inside a car. A loopy little siren. Like a European ambulance, only tiny.

No, not coming from the car. A pen. The woman holding the pen. The same woman who had forced him at gunpoint. Now she produced a pen from inside her black leather coat. The pen was chrome and rather expensive looking. She adjusted the clasp holder and it sprang ceilingward, forming a small antenna. The tiny siren stopped, and a man's crisp, English sounding voice filtered from the fountain pen. The woman listened, then handed the pen-like device to him.

"Your condition, Mr. Kuryakin?" came the voice from the pen.

He wanted to answer but he couldn't. He found himself overwhelmed.

"We received corroborating reports from several authorities," the voice continued. "CIA, Interpol, and most curiously, Thrush. I suspect this does not make much sense to you at the moment. I want you to come in. Rest. Once I receive your report, we will sort this all out."

He watched in amazement as she lowered the antenna. When they pulled up to a row of brownstone apartments, the woman brandished her pistol again, ordered him out of the car, shoved him down a short flight of steps and through the doors of little shop fuzzy with heat and smelling of steamed cotton, and pushed them both through the back wall of a fitting room.

She eventually left him standing in the middle of an office that contained enormous panels some 20 feet wide and full of electronics, buzzers, signals, and markers blazing like a field of fireflies or a tangle of Christmas tree lights. The room also held a large machine in the corner that ticked constantly and spewed a wide ribbon of paper that ended up in a large pile on the floor.

"Good to see you again, both of you," said an elderly gentleman who stood behind the consoles – the voice from the fountain pen. "We had become a bit concerned about you, too, Miss Dancer."

"He needs medical attention, Mr. Waverly," the woman said, deflecting the inquiry. "Diminished capacity, doesn't recognize his name."

"All appropriate sections have been advised of your report from the intercept point Miss Dancer," the old man said flatly, as if restating the obvious. The small but necessary details-a schedule of medical examinations, an official pronouncement of arrest, preparations for taking Mr. Kuryakin's statement-had all been handled while Mr. Kuryakin and Miss Dancer had been en route, the man explained.

"I'll stand by, then, sir," she said, and dropped back to the doorway.

"How are you, Mr. Kuryakin?" Mr. Waverly asked, turning his attention to his guest and speaking slowly, with special emphasis on the word Kuryakin.

The old man was rugged looking, and his face had lines so deep they looked like seams.

"Confused," he-the one these people called Mr. Kuryakin, evidently-managed to say. "Unharmed, I think. Fine."

The old man extended his hand, took Kuryakin's hand in his hand, a hand like the pocket of an old baseball mit, and shook it firmly. The handshake with the old man called Mr. Waverly steadied Mr. Kuryakin a bit. Waverly leaned close, so close the pores on the old man's nose looked magnified, crater-like. The old man peered into Kuryakin's face as if to see the silent and helpless suffering in the brain squirming like a frog behind the eyes.

"Any new insights?"

"Insights… uh… Mr. … Waverly, is it?"

Waverly told him to sit down in a wood, straight-backed chair. So he did, and he sat there, back hard against the wood panels, every muscle aching, while Waverly pushed buttons and thumbed enamel buzzers on the consoles, issuing orders to unseen subordinates.

The man, who was obviously in charge, had ordered a cup of tea with sugar and a corned beef sandwich for Kuryakin. When the meal came, Waverly turned politely away and gazed out a large window that overlooked a river and a towering beauty of steel and glass. He tamped tobacco in his pipe, then discarded the pipe, stood, and strode to Dancer.

"I've seen this kind of thing before," Waverly advised the woman quietly. "We know that Kuryakin's Capsule B pill was inside his communicator pen when we found his discarded clothing in Kennedy International, so we should assume this is Thrush's doing. At this point, any line of questioning might do more harm than good."

Waverly dismissed the woman with the gun, but she volunteered to escort Kuryakin on his round of medical appointments and then through Security-and, she said, she would be more than happy to show their befuddled agent to his quarters.

It was impossible to open his eyes. When he pried the aching muscles behind them enough to form two slits, a buzzing light over his head forced the two slits shut. What's more, something had split his skull in two. It was as if he had received a terrible blow. He began to raise an arm but felt imprisoned beneath a heavy blanket, and after considerable effort, he brought his right arm from under the flannel cover and gingerly touched his temples and rubbed his forehead. No, he could feel no warm blood running, no obvious bumps swelling.

Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin had been sleeping. He understood that much. He did not know for how long, and he did not feel rested, only tired. Tired, and unreal: it was his ghost in a dream that roamed the New York City streets and past all those starved faces bathed in the neon of commerce and consumption. It was his dream-ghost, he decided, that had climbed from the dudgeon of a nightmare-filled sleep and squinted hard against the light that buzzed in the ceiling.

But closing his eyes made his stomach turn upside down and he thought he might vomit. His mind tumbled back through a dizzying mish-mash of nightmarish impressions that refused to congeal into a cohesive and sensible whole. So he concentrated instead on forcing his eyes open and getting used to the light a little at a time, in longer and longer intervals.

After he had adjusted reasonably to the bright light, he began an inventory of his environs. The walls were glistening steel. The light came from white fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. A small desk next to his cot held a typewriter, portable, and a sheath of papers. There was a door with a wire-mesh window. He was in custody, it dawned on him, and this cave of steel was his prison cell. And this prison cell-he was shaken by a sudden shock of recognition.

It seemed impossible, but it could not be otherwise: he was inside an U.N.C.L.E. detention cell.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent was thoroughly familiar with the New York City headquarters building, and the familiar was normally comfortable. But this time there was cold comfort under the bright fluorescence. This had to be a nightmare or somebody's cruel joke, he thought, as he looked around the austere room, glanced at the plate of burnt toast, inhaled the insipid smell of reheated coffee, eyed the dour-face sentry outside the door sporting U.N.C.L.E.'s distinctive triangular security badge.

Within moments, Kuryakin had cleared his head enough to understand one thing: for whatever reason, he had not returned stateside to a hero's welcome.

This was bad. But, bad as it was, the situation, he soon began to suspect, would only worsen. As he struggled to sit up on his hard cot, he saw on the desk a half-inch thick folder inside a black cover. He picked up the folder with exaggerated caution, as if the thing might explode, and gently turned back the cover.

It was a dossier, a compendium of police reports and other analyses. His heart raced as he ran through the pages hastily at first. He then went back to scan them more carefully, and he blinked in disbelief at what he read.

Details of an assignment in Berlin-his and Napoleon Solo's assignment-had been dissected and pored over many times, by experts from within U.N.C.L.E. and from without. The world of espionage and law enforcement, it seemed, was watching a bizarre drama unfold.

Kuryakin read, over and over, the mass of words that he came to realize would remain with him for the rest of his life.

He felt dull witted, inarticulate. But it was his duty now to fill out his field report. When he began laboring over the small typewriter, tapping at the hard keys, wrestling with a way to put into words his account of the terrible events, the full impact sank in with each stroke of the keys. He became all too aware that his ordeal was a law enforcement embarrassment, the result of one snafu after another. The blown cover. A dangerous madman at large in Berlin. And, my God, the shooting, the shooting.

By the end of the day, the amnesiac effects had worn off, and his head was full of disturbing thoughts, not the least of them the unreality of having to fit a human tragedy into a five-page report.

It occurred to him as he walked with a guard through the brightly lit building that everyone knew. It was the way they looked, some shade of difference in their glance, their eyes. In this strange drama, he was the actor whose blunder flurried the other actors and put them off their lines.

When the guard left him standing in front of Alexander Waverly, Kuryakin was shaking like a drunken soldier, and disappointment was etched in the old man's face.

Kuryakin's superior carried the burden of maintaining international peace with a professorial aplomb. Waverly, he knew, always fumed privately. The people who worked for the head of U.N.C.L.E. never found him in the doldrums. But this time, the old man decided to remind Kuryakin of the dramatic possibilities of a world coming apart. Waverly brought his fist down hard on Kuryakin's field report, shaking three unlit pipes and a canister of tobacco, and unsettling any loose papers in the otherwise orderly pile.

Then Waverly walked around the desk and took Kuryakin brusquely by the right elbow. Escorting him beneath the fluorescence and along the metal hallways, the old man said, "Mr. Kuryakin, I have always admired your articulate command of the king's English, as it were, particularly considering you are no doubt far more comfortable with the native tongue of your beloved Dostoevsky. But this is one time in your career I urge you to choose your words with utmost care."

His voice was stern but calm, even confident.

"Perhaps better not to speak unless spoken to," Kuryakin offered diffidently.

The old man grunted. "Undoubtedly, Mr. Kuryakin. Undoubtedly."

They were due soon to meet some of the world's top spies. When someone said pay attention in the darkened classroom, Kuryakin had learned, you'd better hide your knuckles, and you'd better look smart. The overwhelmed agent had decided that, when the time came, he would stare back hard at the vultures gathered in the conference room and confess, simply and without embellishment, to shooting Napoleon Solo, the number one operative for U.N.C.L.E.

Kuryakin stumbled once, his knees slipping away like so much water, and Waverly propped him up. Kuryakin had seen Waverly send off agents who were never heard from again. He understood from having watched Waverly in action all these years that those people whose jobs involve great emotional stress often develop an amazing stoic power to defer emotion-a power that momentarily eluded Kuryakin. None had it more than the old man who was to meet with some of the world's preeminent espionage leaders.

"Hold it together, my good man," Waverly said, bracing an arm around Kuryakin's back. "At least for the show."

Kuryakin felt unsteady, jittery. He was suffering a side effect, from either the junk the Thrush gorilla had jabbed into his biceps or the brutal treatment he'd received at the hands of agents in Security and doctors in Medical.

He'd had a rough couple of days, to be sure. After a day on the lam in a tattered gray suit, he was glad for the warm familiarity of his old loose trousers and a clean black T-shirt, but he felt ill at ease for having to endure his house arrest sans shoulder holster and its customary accoutrements. His wrists still stung from the handcuffs Security agents had unlocked late last night.

It was April Dancer who had slapped the cuffs on him. He couldn't blame her for the little extra zeal she had introduced into his apprehension and detainment. She was, after all, a comrade in arms, their protégé, his and Solo's, in her early years with the United Network Command. Over the years, he and Solo had come to hold the young agent in affectionate regard. In particular, Solo had shared many of her baptisms by fire in the fields of destruction Thrush had tried to cultivate in the late 1960s.

It was a salve to Kuryakin's wounded professional pride that she had found him so easily last night on the streets of New York City. She was well trained.

Holed up inside a small conference room that was unadorned except by a stark chalkboard and a standard clock, Kuryakin recognized the men. Some of them looked like spies, dressed in frayed sports jackets, keeping up a light percussion of scratching and tapping with pens and pencils inside tiny black moleskin notebooks. Others looked like businessmen, dressed in ties and pants with knife-like creases, fabric rustling as legs crossed and uncrossed.

A powwow of this kind was a rarity at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. Normally, these men were rivals to one another, and often, to U.N.C.L.E. Normally, these men were out to beat each other. U.N.C.L.E. was usually the odd man, the one without the need to operate according to local political objectives. It was a rare occasion for the agencies to gather in one place to work with or for an U.N.C.L.E. goal or agenda. And expecting the many members of the intelligence community to agree on anything was like thinking everyone in your family could get along at Thanksgiving Day dinner, Waverly had said once.

Now Kuryakin's superior, the old man in the crisp blue shirt and navy tie, did his pipe trick for the world's spies. A couple of times, absently, he picked up his cold pipe and puffed at if for several seconds before realizing it was unlit, stared at it vaguely, lit another match, and watched the match burn. The spies picked up on the cue to light up.

"The unknown is always frightening," Waverly addressed the men, leaning back in his chair behind a small cloud of cherry-wood smoke. "Today, we are faced with many unknowns. As you know, the United Network Command is not a game run without rules."

He glanced around the table. Waverly might have been reading a radio broadcast, so avuncular and patient was his tone.

"Two days ago, shots rang out at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Soon your governments learned that our top operative, Mr. Napoleon Solo, had been killed. Another of our top operatives, Mr. Illya Kuryakin, was placed under investigation for the killing of his fellow officer during a covert operation in Berlin."

Politzei reports were sketchy, Waverly explained: no body found, only a trail of smeared blood matching Solo's type. Reports to internal affairs indicated Kuryakin seemed headed for West Berlin headquarters to detail the tragic incident and his part in it. While headed to U.N.C.L.E., Thrush agents captured him so he could be injected with an amnesia-producing substance of an unknown variety. Nobody could determine whether Kuryakin escaped or was let go. Nobody could explain how Solo's body had disappeared in broad daylight.

The spies looked at Kuryakin. He steeled himself, refused to flinch.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent was proud not to be counted among these spies. The USSR, where the government was locking up poets and novelists and journalists, was represented in U.N.C.L.E., as well as many countries that infringed upon their citizens. His new country, his adopted nation, was struggling over the conflict over the war and the disillusionment of the 1960s assassinations and civil disorders. With detached bemusement, he had observed both countries telling their citizens the true concern was the other superpower.

The world of the Vietnam War years had moved ever further beyond the comparatively clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass. And, as it had, Kuryakin took increasing solace in the knowledge that he was no spy in the ordinary sense of that word – that he owed loyalty to no single government.

U.N.C.L.E. was a supranational organization sworn to somehow keep the world safe and, if possible, sane. Kuryakin had come to see any enemy of any peaceful and honest person in the world was the enemy of U.N.C.L.E.

It was hard work, dangerous work. He and Solo had shown daredevil nerve many times, but always with a single purpose in their lives — to enforce the law and keep the world safe from warped power-mad criminals. For that purpose, Kuryakin had studied, learned 15 languages, left the service of the country of his birth to work for what he truly considered the only sane group of people on earth — U.N.C.L.E. — the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

"There must be no outcry," Waverly told the group. "It's been kept out of the papers so far. If there's any chance that Mr. Solo is still alive, if there's any chance that this is all a horrible mistake, Mr. Solo's safety depends on absolute secrecy."

The CIA man cleared his throat, touched a corner of his round tortoise-shell horn-rimmed glasses.

"They'd be crazy to harm him," the man said, and he offered Kuryakin a reassuring smile.

Reports of the mishap had come from CIA witnesses. Kuryakin knew the key CIA witness was an old friend of Solo's, Lancaster Loveless, a peer from Solo's post-Korean War training years.

"They will have us all down their throats if they did," the CIA man said with a look of stern resolve.

Napoleon has many friends, Kuryakin thought. There was even word of a loose cannon within the MI 5 ranting about using his license to kill to exact revenge for Solo's death.

"Still, Thrush has done some crazy things in its time," the KGB man said.

Kuryakin had learned from the Security reports, that the East German Stasi had immediately informed the KGB, whose officers fired off an angry communiqué to Waverly, demanding the whole story.

"Definitely," Waverly said. "They want to take over the world by destroying the world. Most of you in attendance represent governments which have containment and deterrence as the mandate for world peace."

Two or three of the men fidgeted in their seats. The old fox was at work.

"It's not a stretch to think Thrush has found some inspiration in your particular brand of madness," he went on.

"We must save the world from the politicians, as well," the man from MI 5 said with a robust laugh.

"Yes, well, you are well aware how much I deplore simplistic doctrine of single governments," Waverly said, turning to the Englishman. "Doctrines purport to define one's behavior in future situations where it may or may not be suitable. That said, knowing that Thrush believes in a doctrine of greed and world domination, we do have a very real enemy."

"Tell us something we didn't know," the CIA man jumped in.

"Very well," Waverly said, unruffled. "There seems reason to imagine a possibility even more unthinkable than the murder of a fellow agent. Mr. Kuryakin and Mr. Solo have reported that Thrush has cultivated a new threat to our world."

"What kind?" the KGB man asked.

"Biological, likely a virus. They recently attempted to move samples into East Berlin. Unfortunately, this mishap with Mr. Solo occurred while tracing the samples move into East Berlin."

"I must only guess that East Berlin is the first step," the KGB man said nervously. "Thrush is at our front door."

"Exactly," Waverly said. "And that puts Thrush at the front door of the whole world. Would Thrush use the weapon to destroy millions of people? Not likely. They want their minions alive and well, after all. No, the more likely threat is the use of the virus for leverage, influence, to blackmail governments. Possibly, to pit our governments against one another, so that we collapse or annihilate one another over a series of misunderstandings."

"Leaving Thrush to come in and pick up the pieces," said the man from MI 5.

"Possibly."

"And so, you are asking for our cooperation," the man from the CIA said.

"If by cooperation, you mean stay out of the way, then that is exactly what I'm telling you to do," Waverly said, frowning. "This case crosses a line into Cold War espionage, what with the Berlin incident. But keep your agents out of our way, give us your support when we call upon you, and we will resolve this case with our usual efficiency."

"Er, who exactly are you sending to take care of this," the MI 5 man asked.

Waverly paused, pursed his lips.

"Gentlemen, we are continuing our mission as it was planned," he said. "I'm sending Mr. Kuryakin back to Berlin. Our Number Three, April Dancer, will go with him."

"I beg your pardon, Alexander," the man from the CIA said. "You've placed your agent under arrest, for review by internal investigation, and you're sending him back into the field?"

"No need to beg my pardon. You know I am not one prone to apologies," Waverly said, quietly, patiently, and a wave of mild laughter passed among the men. "This might be odd in your organizations. However, Mr. Kuryakin knows the case and will have resources at his disposal. I must also consider that once he returns to the scene of the crime, it will also be solved."

"I still do not understand all the circumstances," the man from the KGB asked.

His big face reminded Kuryakin of Jack Ruby, hat tilted forward, glasses folded in his vest.

"And neither do we," Waverly said. "Neither, for that matter, does Mr. Kuryakin, who has suffered from a bout of amnesia.

Waverly relaxed a bit in the leather-cushioned chair and picked up his pipe again. "A simple accident? Unlikely. A rogue ploy?"

He raised his bushy eyebrows as he glanced at Kuryakin. "Again, unlikely, as our boys stay on the straight and narrow. The strongest possibility, gentlemen — a Thrush plan.

"But I don't have enough details of the crime to make that determination. Regardless, we are on the clock, and U.N.C.L.E. must move fast, with your cooperation."

Waverly looked around the table.

"Well, gentlemen," he said. "Anything else for the good of the cause to which we are all so devoted?"

There was more clearing of throats and shifting in chairs, but nobody said anything.

Waverly let the silence hang in the air like the cherry-scented smoke from his pipe. Then, after a moment, he cleared his throat, a symbolic clearing of the deck.

After muttering his farewell to his guests as they rose from their chairs to leave, Waverly looked over at his operative, canted his eyebrows, and released a long blue cloud of smoke that climbed in a slow spiral toward a ceiling of nondescript institutional-white tiles.


	2. Section II:

SECTION II : "They Come Not Single Spies, But Two Agents from U.N.C.L.E."

 _Somewhere in U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters, New York City, Nov. 4, 1971_

He sat for a long time alone, a tired cop slaving over the ponderous binder of police reports, his jacket off, a coffee cup staining the wood grain of the conference table.

Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin could not remember a day like this in his entire career as an enforcement agent for U.N.C.L.E. He enjoyed his work. The profession provided him with what he loved best in life: excursions into the mystery of human behavior, as well as chances to save humanity from the extremes of human behavior. He enjoyed, too, the discipline of the practical application of his own scientific and rational deductions.

It saddened him that he had his own terrible mystery of behavior to solve. It saddened him, also, to witness in himself a sudden death of pleasure.

Laconic and usually withdrawn (those who knew him called him pensive and brooding), Kuryakin found himself wanting to shrink further from the temptations of friendship and human loyalty. With the merest of shrugs, he had rebuffed April Dancer when she found him sitting alone at the conference room table.

"Berlin. Dreadful," she had said, and later, too, she took a tentative step to commiserate with the agent. When the painful words seared his reeling mind, he fought for composure, locking it in a clenched jaw.

"Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin is one agent who, I would imagine, would be thoroughly versed in the rules of gun safety - an agent for whom this should never be an issue," she said. "Frankly, you would dream up a more imaginative way to accidentally kill the guy."

Conversely, he could think of nothing, no such condolences, to offer in kind, nothing to right their world or quiet their shared suffering. So the next morning he was one of two solitary and sullen figures who took seats in the first-class section of a commercial flight to Berlin. He was the youngish, Slavic-looking man with the thatch of straw-blonde hair, feeling ever so slightly clammy in his black turtleneck under a green parka, the man who would spend the entire flight staring out the window, hand on his chin, as if the ocean below required his full concentration. She was the woman he pretended to pay no attention to, the woman who would spend the whole flight plowing through _Anna Karenina_.

Above the Atlantic, he let his mind riffle through a flickering reel of dying bodies, the expendable who had died at his hands. They were the bad guys, all of them, Thrush thugs, for the most part. But he had not killed them in cold blood. Death, murder, was only a last resort, to save your hide, if not the world.

Waverly once had made a point that some well-trained men, for whatever reasons, disregard common sense. But Kuryakin believed to the depths of his soul that any U.N.C.L.E. agent, with any experience dealing with Thrush, would learn to be cautious of the most innocuous things. He and Napoleon Solo alone had enough experience with things like dolls that shoot bullets, robots that attack on the street, milk bottles that explode. They would be insanely careless not to stick with the rubric-never point a gun at one of your own. He was much too professional for this to have happened.

He saw again in his mind the checkpoint gate loom in front of him and Solo as they drove up in their rented BMW, the policeman-not much more than a boy in late adolescence, really-asking for identification, and the "Good luck!" from the young policeman.

"Hmm, yes, well...," Solo had stammered in surprised reply, and Kuryakin had noted his partner's face creased in a suspicious frown.

He thought he understood Solo's dismay. Solo was not one to readily acknowledge his supposed luck. Although, why did the officer say that? What did the officer normally say to travelers crossing the border? Did something in the papers Kuryakin handed over tip off the kid that he and Solo represented the law, sped to the scene to hunt down some vicious warped criminal?

The East German sentry was next. Kuryakin remembered applying the brakes and taking a deep breath. He remembered watching the thick-lipped, iron-eyed East German police officer, nattily uniformed in gray-green, with gleaming boots and an unslung burp gun. The policeman had stepped up to the window and carelessly rested the barrel of his gun on the window ledge. Kuryakin had looked down the round black hole and sighed. He had handed over his identification papers. The policeman had looked at Kuryakin without much interest and then nodded the burp gun barrel toward Solo.

 _"Wen darf ich melden?"_ the guard had barked.

"You will see that we are both in those papers," Kuryakin had replied in an official tone. "KGB has cleared us to travel."

The policeman nodded and handed back the papers and turned away, signaling to two militiamen in field dress.

Again, confusion over the papers. Again: _"Wen darf ich melden?"_

Again, his attempt to explain: _"Wenn ist das Nunnstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja, ja, beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput."_

More men emerged from the guardhouse, men in overcoats, but not uniforms, then the face of Grieves coming into view, in shadow beneath a broad-brimmed hat.

Kuryakin had noticed something in that instant from Solo, the subtle signal only a long-term partner in this business might see. The tilt of his head, perhaps, or a certain light in the dark brown eyes. Something or somebody –- more than the presence of Grieves in the group - had set off Solo's alarm. What was it?

"Get out of the car, Mr. Kuryakin, Mr. Solo," Grieves had instructed, and at the same time, three Uzis snapped into firing position and pointed at the windshield. Kuryakin and Solo complied.

He remembered the cold grip of his Special beneath his suit coat. He remembered the light pressure of his trigger finger, the dry cough of a pistol, and Solo's horrified face, inches from his own.

 _Somewhere in West Berlin, Sometime past Midnight, Nov. 6, 1971_

Compliments of Berlin headquarters, Kuryakin and Dancer had access to a bungalow, as well as a late model Volvo in the garage complex behind the building. The rooms had windows with sills filled with stiff-legged stink bugs on their backs. The mattresses were broken and smelled like mildew and sour milk. The blinds were torn and nicotine yellow. But Kuryakin knew this was no holiday in the sun and there was no time to lose. They stopped at the bungalow long enough only to drop off their luggage and suit up for the mission.

The plan: return to the scene of the crime, attract attention, and surrender. They would learn the location of the operation, one of them would escape and report to Berlin headquarters.

Kuryakin spotted Dancer's gun in its holster as she slipped into her leather coat. Looking at the slim piece, he thought of its lethal purpose and what each of the little jacketed pieces of metal within would do to a man or woman.

A kid standing under a streetlight outside their bungalow looked tired and sick. His long, blonde hair was stringy and greasy, and he strummed a beat-up guitar, its battered case open at his feet for money people might throw his way.

Kuryakin dug for some Deutsche Marks in the pockets of his black jeans, tossed the dull coins into the case.

Words, through a thick German accent, part of a Bob Dylan lyric: "To live outside the law you must be honest..."

Then, the kid stopped singing to taunt after the two agents who sauntered away from him down the street: "Hey, man, don't shoot me, I'm just a slow dancer, not real to you at all. . ."

Not too far away stood the Brandenburg Gate and the infamous wall, or the Schandmauer, the West Berliners called it - the Wall of Shame.

Kuryakin did not care much for Berlin. He and Solo never had. Still, over the years, he had come to appreciate the city, for the ways it differed from the rest of Germany-Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich. The leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs had struck root. The bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades. The faded advertisements painted on firewalls, which bore witness to cigarette brands and types of schnapps and beers that had long ceased to exist. Berlin traffic lights were smaller, the rooms higher, the elevators older than in West Germany. There were always new cracks in the asphalt, and out of them the past grew luxuriantly.

But, at the same time, it was for what this city represented that he had left the service of his own country-to bridge the politically and ideologically imposed walls that divided people from one another. He had seen the failure of a dream in his own country, and he had seen over the past eight years many other places where there had not yet even been time to dream amid the misery.

Now, inside this microcosm of Cold War insanity, there was a man –-Cornwell Grieves –- who served an organization that wanted to kill all dreams, all dreams but the dream of keeping every misery as it was.

It was an organization Kuryakin hoped to eradicate, and all like it. Then, perhaps, he could find time to slow down, to retreat from the world for some long overdue vacation. He longed for days when he could relax in his New York City apartment and listen to his jazz records or read his books. Or perhaps he could even travel, as he had always wanted to, alone and afraid of no one and nothing, with no one afraid of him.

Berlin. Dreadful.

She was right.

She breathed clouds beside him, and his alert sense of smell picked up… what? Nothing. There was no scent of shampoo, no exotic perfume of jasmine or even anything as light as green tea. That was simply smart tradecraft, to remain as invisible as possible, even in smell.

Of course, she was smart. Over the years, Thrush had thrown a lot of nonsense her way, and she had survived. He, Solo, and Dancer had found themselves in many a bizarre landscape where nothing made sense. This time, operating under the assumption that their longtime partner and friend was dead, the landscape seemed even stranger. This time, Kuryakin had a sense of the world far more fluid and fantastic than he thought he could have imagined.

Was this a crisis to bring careers to the end of the road, to bring good agents to the end of their wits? Maybe the mishap was a sign he was too old for the rigors of fieldwork? Or too tired or cynical? Even the best agents become shell shocked.

A lot of agents had their active service curtailed through injury. Many of them continued at U.N.C.L.E. out of a sense of community and dedication. Those no longer capable of fieldwork went on pension and continued to function as part of the eyes and ears of U.N.C.L.E. There were opportunities to work as an aging or disabled spy. After all, who would suspect the man in the wheelchair or the woman with the white cane?

He had to laugh a little to himself when, in his mind's eye, he cast Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin in the role one of those old-timers. Would he go on to distinguish himself as one of U.N.C.L.E.'s aging field men who failed to qualify for the top administrative jobs, who instead had to take the soft assignments at places like John F. Kennedy International Airport or the Waldorf-Astoria? He recalled the affable faces of likeable fellows like McNabb and Walker and Taylor who padded around the airports and hotels of New York City, no greater demand on their time than an occasional communication with headquarters. Fine work for retirement years, Kuryakin supposed.

Dancer dropped her head a little as they walked, so that a cascade of shoulder length hair hid her face.

Dead drop - no.

Drop dead gorgeous. Wasn't that the awful pun around headquarters in her early days? See her in action! they had said. 108 pounds of dynamite! U.N.C.L.E.'s newest secret weapon!

The spy industry was a man's world, and it could not have been easy coming up through the ranks in stiletto heels and short skirts. But she had threaded the hot and deadly shadows of international intrigue for many years now.

In the beginning, everyone at New York headquarters had been brightened and delighted by the appearance of a new face among the field agents of U.N.C.L.E.'s enforcement section - a tall, elegant, leggy young woman with sleek and shining auburn-colored hair which she wore full and to her shoulders. This, together with her steady gaze, gave her a commanding manner and a paradoxical personality combining warm nubility with cool efficiency.

Within a week of her arrival, she had become the target of many seductive attempts by officers - married and unmarried alike - of all ages. Kuryakin had noticed her, as had Solo, and heard the reports. Word was that everyone had been rebuffed and that Dancer wasn't the kind of female anybody - man or woman - took for granted. Now Kuryakin wondered what it would be like working close to the woman from U.N.C.L.E.

Throughout those early years, Kuryakin had remained professionally respectful. As Solo was fond of pointing out, Dancer was desirable, but, like so many of the women working within the network these days, she remained friendly yet at pains to make it plain that she was her own woman and therefore Kuryakin's and Solo's equal.

"We're in this together, old pal," Dancer muttered as they turned a corner that opened onto a boulevard burning with the lights of the district's first taverns.

Kuryakin nodded. He could feel his reticence melting. Maybe it was due to the adrenaline response to possible danger, or to the altruistic sense of purpose that spurred him at the beginning of each new assignment. Or maybe it was the satisfaction of having started his detective work, of engaging the chase. He rallied a mild smile to the glance from April Dancer.

Armies of snarling boys and shrieking girls prowled the early morning streets. Decked out in black combat boots and tight leather, the kids had the desperate look of hungry ghosts wandering utterly lost in the dark.

Kuryakin and Dancer ducked into a little café, an espresso bar, tacitly agreeing to fortify themselves with food and caffeine before their night on the town. The place was dark, reminiscent of a 1950s Beatnik hangout, complete with a small stage. But the café was sad, smelling of stale smoke and burnt coffee; it had the air of neglect, even disuse.

Kuryakin and Dancer sat at a corner table near the window, waiting for their order.

"It's strange we're here at all," Kuryakin volunteered after a long silence.

"Not so strange. Apparently nothing really works ordinarily at New York headquarters, does it?" Dancer said. There was the ghost of a smile. "Of course, I think that's due to Mr. Waverly himself. Although he seems to be all rules and regulations, in fact, it seems the old guy plays by his own rules and organizes things probably differently than the other heads of U.N.C.L.E. I mean, I wouldn't be here with you otherwise. Hell, you wouldn't be here otherwise. Most spy bosses would still have you in cuffs. In a way, it's all Mr. Waverly's experiment, isn't it?"

Of course, Kuryakin knew, too, that he, Kuryakin, was conceivably as much an "experiment" as Dancer, although it took him a little longer to be promoted.

Solo joined U.N.C.L.E. in 1956. As the youngest head of Section Two, Solo had come quickly along the traditional route. Kuryakin had graduated a year later from survival school, but still he had made it swiftly to number two. But Dancer, a 1964 Radcliffe graduate, had made it, by 1967, to third in no time.

"Seems Waverly is used to pulling threads," Kuryakin said, with a smug chuckle.

"Strings!" Dancer said, with a burst of laughter that made a couple, an old man and woman, look up from across the otherwise empty café, annoyed. Her eyes were shining. "The expression is, pull strings!"

Her laughter was only kind, he knew, and she had such an amused expression, he had to laugh, too. Something of an outsider himself at the outset, a Russian in America, Kuryakin secretly felt tickled that April Dancer had gotten the boost, fair or not. As a rookie, she was thrust immediately into the clutches of Thrush and ended up saving his skin and Solo's, Waverly's two top agents. That had to earn you - what was it that Napoleon said? Greenie spears? Or, no - brown points?

"My feeling is you could make a Section Two head in another Continental headquarters soon, and it would not be inconceivable to someday see a woman in Section One," he said, playing it nonchalant. Dancer had not stopped smiling, lingering, apparently, over his linguistic slip.

They drank their coffee in silence for a while.

"I'm feeling a little vengeful," she said, when they stood up. Perfunctorily, almost absentmindedly, she patted the places under her jacket Kuryakin knew held her tools of trade: the Special, the Communicator, probably a package of gum and some cigarettes, a slim gold tube of lipstick that packed explosive paste.

"That's never a good way to start a job, but I thought you should know," she said.

"That would mean I'm your target?" Kuryakin asked, in good humor and certain she meant something else. Nevertheless, as he said the words, he felt for more than a second not unlike the victim led lowing to the altar.

When Dancer looked at him out on the sidewalk, it was apparent from the surprise overspreading her features that the implications of her words had hit her.

"Oh, no," she said, her face flushed. "That's not what I mean. You know I mean _them_. You know, I defied orders. I ignored a recall so I could stay out there and find you. And, you'd be dead from that junk if I hadn't brought you in. I'm on your side, old friend."

"I appreciate that," Kuryakin said, quietly, tugging the zipper of his parka all the way up to his neck. It was a cold night, too cold to snow, with stars glittering like ice shards.

"Listen, let's be careful out there, okay?" she said firmly. "Let's get out of this place alive. Together."

"I wouldn't have it any other way," he said, and they slipped like shadows into a Berlin night under a sky filled with icy stars.


	3. Section III:

SECTION III : "… And Who Should 'Scape Whipping?"

 _Somewhere in West Berlin, Shortly before Daybreak, Nov. 7, 1971_

From his side of their bungalow, early the next morning, Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin heard the sound of a shot, beyond the lot in back. He had been sleeping. He seemed to awake in the moment before hearing, as if in a dream, the noise that had woken him; he had been through enough gunfights to know the sound of gunpowder under percussion, sometimes in machine-gun waves, other times, like this time, in a single, lonely sound.

His partner had heard it, too, for she stirred in her room, beyond his closed door, and her voice, faraway, called faintly for him and then fell away. It was not quite light outside. The trees past the garages had silhouettes, their masses soaking up that wash of bluish light, with a faint pink tinge to the sky, before birds begin to twitter. The street was silent, the pavement frosted, the lanes devoid of traffic.

But it was nothing. By the time April Dancer appeared in the cold sunlight of his doorway, he'd determined it was only the orange Opel Rekord stalled in the street just outside the inner courtyard of their garage complex. A backfire, he advised her.

His partner, the lovely young enforcement agent for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, had that slightly disheveled look that comes from sleeping in your clothes, but her brown-leather Berns-Martin shoulder holster hugged her blouse, and a black weapon snuggled against her ribcage. She pushed her long dark hair back, away from her ears.

He packed his own weapon, the U.N.C.L.E. Special, his constant companion in mayhem, and, still shaking the dream fragments from his hair, stepped through the doorway with April Dancer into the brisk morning air.

"Homicides are usually solved in the first 72 hours," Dancer said. They were heading across the street to Das Café Karlsruhe.

"No, they're solved in the first 48 hours, and we're a day behind," Kuryakin replied curtly, but he saw that her delicate features divulged no captiousness, no anxiety. He caught her dark eyes for a moment and then quickly looked away, glancing around him and down the street, as if trying to accustom his senses to the surroundings. "But who's counting?"

Dancer had been in touch with New York City. Alexander Waverly was anticipating action, or maybe trying to induce developments; the old man had jetted Mark Slate to Berlin headquarters to command a strike force that would storm the Thrush operation Kuryakin and Dancer had yet to find.

It seemed an odd morning to think about morbid combats: early sunlight slanted into the street, eliciting diamond-like sparkles from the sidewalks, and the small storefronts had been transformed overnight into resplendent displays of holiday goods. They passed a window brimming with ornaments fashioned from pieces of colored glass: cozy snowcapped cottages, candles inside wreaths, whimsical rocking horses.

Christmas in Berlin. Great. Living in America for the past couple of decades, Kuryakin had grown accustomed to the Western world, had undergone complete assimilation into its culture, and ignoring the bright and tinseled festivities his adopted world offered on an all too frequent basis had become impossible. As a resident of New York City, Kuryakin had a hard time disguising his increasing disdain for Thanksgiving, the Macy's parade, and the long weekend that ushered in the frenetic season of shopping and mindless merriment. Still, not even a deathbed confession could tear from his lips his secret: Kuryakin had come to cherish the effort his long-term partner, Napoleon Solo, had made over the duration of their friendship, the gentle yet persistent nudging meant to indoctrinate Kuryakin into America's crass capitalist rituals. Not that he liked the holiday season any more than he liked baseball or Yankee stadium hot dogs. But these things made up the weave of Solo; they were what made the old friend and section head so uniquely Napoleon Solo.

Now his dear friend might be dead. Along with that painful acknowledgment, Kuryakin realized he had no regrets about any of the traditions Solo had coerced him into joining. His long friendship with Napoleon Solo - it had been American as hell, yes, but what a time it had been.

Momentarily, looking down the long row of bright shops, he felt swept up in the special ambience of the commercial zone. Briefly, he entertained the notion of walking inside a shop to purchase the rocking horse ornament as a Christmas present for Solo. An exercise in faith, perhaps. He noticed a price tag and swore audibly, outraged at the price, miffed at the tawdry customs mankind attached to its twisted interpretations of religious meaning.

Kuryakin heard the sound of a guitar. He turned a baleful eye toward the kid who already had taken up his spot on the corner. The unkempt longhaired boy was about two blocks ahead of them. Kuryakin considered asking him to leave the area, in the unlikely event there was trouble with trigger-happy Thrush thugs.

Where did the kid sleep?

What did he eat?

Kuryakin thrust his hands in the pockets of his black jeans, fishing for coins.

"We don't have time for that," Dancer whispered. His friend grabbed his wrist.

She was doing her job. Mentally, he was simply not present, Kuryakin realized. Such inattention could cost an individual in this profession his life in a split second.

But it was with more than a little embarrassment that he realized Dancer had misinterpreted his momentary lapse as a need to visit the little Christmas shop. It hardly mattered. He studied his partner's face carefully for a moment, then shrugged, helplessly feeling the pall of dejected acceptance slip over him again as it had so many times on this miserable assignment. The kid's earnest strumming went on, pelting Kuryakin's consciousness. This time the kid sang some American-sounding folksong, a dirge-like song Kuryakin could not place. It was something plaintive but wistful, delicate and inexplicable. The lyrics alluded to a dream of the Nazi numbered coming and contained a refrain that lamented Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s.

Trying to shake the haunting words from his head, Kuryakin scanned the headlines on the latest newspapers a pudgy man was placing in his kiosk.

Somehow the checkpoint mishap had stayed out of the news. Every morning Kuryakin had made a point to peruse every English and German newspaper at the kiosk, and he had found no mention of the incident. Somebody was doing a good job of keeping a lid on things, whether that was the Berlin arm of the Command, Thrush, or another player, the CIA, say, or perhaps the West or East Berlin police.

Kuryakin hated the media, hated advertising and television, and all the relentless and insipid influences of the mid-20th century. Everything he loved and respected had been the product of intense individualism-the jazz musicians he most admired, the authors he read. That gave him another reason to despise Grieves and Thrush; he despised what Grieves and Thrush stood for more strongly than ever before. It was the fantastic gall of renouncing the individual in favor of the mass. And when had mass ideals ever brought benefit or wisdom? Grieves cared nothing for human life. He dreamed only of armies of anonymous men and women bound by the lowest common denominator. He wanted to shape the world in his own image, and for that he created blank, soulless automatons.

Kuryakin mulled over his progress, feeling the inaction gnawing at his nerves. He reflected upon his and Dancer's prowling with feline inquiry through the cavern-like dives of the Berlin night, scanning the discos and clubs not just for the usual suspects but for the figures who thronged and lingered in the rooms. He could hardly imagine the miniature dramas that must come and go through this strange territory of the world's night people. A restless and twitching generation, he had thought. The throbbing music was usually a bad try at the blues, mostly sax and bass, and there was no air, only smoke and talk. Sometimes there was laughter, high and shrill, like pain.

To Kuryakin's mind, he and Dancer seemed to glide among these people, seemed to slip with liquid confidence through time, so that one scene showed the Russian and the young American girl tramping across the harsh width of the street, their breath condensing into conspiratorial steam, while another eavesdropped on Kuryakin and Dancer, with their guns packed and ready, as they studied plastic-sheathed menu books and ordered a pre-mission breakfast.

A young girl with hazel eyes served them burnt coffee and hard toast. She put their cups and plates down before them on the table. Kuryakin waited until she had gone to the other side of the room.

"What do you know about Grieves?" Kuryakin asked patiently, gazing out the window.

"I know him from his dossier, and I know he's little more than a killer," Dancer said matter-of-factly. "He tried to kill Mark Slate, too. Ideologically, he's distasteful. An ugly American. Ex-McCarthy-era type, anti-Communist, looks like an uptight business tycoon. A man with ambition for himself and remorseless in the destruction of others. The usual Thrush traits."

"When Grieves approached us at the checkpoint crossing, Napoleon noticed something," Kuryakin began, trying to sift through the images again.

"What?"

"Something out of place," Kuryakin continued slowly, watching the pieces of the old scene fall into place again in his head. "For the briefest of moments, Napoleon had this look of surprise that comes from seeing something familiar in an incongruous setting."

"Like greeting a friend who doesn't smile back."

"Exactly." Kuryakin felt frustrated, though, that this was all that had come of the assignment so far: the best he had was only this vague impression. No hard evidence. Only this merest of handholds.

They ate silently for a while and gazed through the window at twists of fog rising like specters from a leaden street. Of the dozens of people materializing on the sidewalk, two alone - dark-clad, serious-faced - caught Kuryakin's attention, and he nodded to Dancer and then at the little scene unfolding across the street. Two men were going through trashcans, scampering like demented scavengers beneath the windows of Kuryakin and Dancer's bungalow.

The men were elbows-deep in trash, patiently and methodically depositing garbage - coffee grinds, grapefruit peels, Quaker oats boxes - in neat piles on the pavement. They could be anybody, of course. Maybe not Thrush at all. Police? KGB? CIA? But too overfed for bums, Kuryakin thought. He watched the dreary men empty the garbage bins and at last look around empty-handed and bewildered amid the mess they'd created.

Kuryakin pushed back from the table, scraping the chair on the floor. He and Dancer stood simultaneously and their eyes met. He was glad she was there.

"No harm in finding out what these guys are up to, is there?" Kuryakin said.

"They seem harmless enough," Dancer said with a little smile lighting up her face.

Kuryakin was feeling tired from the long night. But here was the opening they'd been looking for, the chance to let the bad guys take the bait and lure them to their location. Tired as he was, nevertheless, as he and Dancer crossed the street, he took extra care to notice everything around him. Such vigilance kept him alive. Sometimes the fieldwork could be a nightmare to choreograph and control, and not all the actors and extras hit their marks with exactness in the live performance. The fieldwork this morning sailed on, however, like the most frictionless of dreams. As expected, both men whirled on their heels, pulled snub-nosed pistols from their armpits, and Kuryakin and Dancer did their bit by feigning surprise and raising their arms in the surrender manner. The men's eyes darted nervously back and forth between the two agents, and slowly, the men drew their gun hands closer to their bodies, glanced around the street to see if anyone had noticed.

More routine followed: the men hissed impatiently, looked around, shook their pistols, and forced Kuryakin and Dancer to relinquish their Specials, just in time for a black BMW to appear from around the corner a block away and pull to the curb. The rear door was opened from the inside, and the roof lights went on.

They got in. The men smelled bad. Squeezed between the two men, Kuryakin and Dancer were soon rolling through the streets of West Berlin toward a definite destination. Kuryakin sniffed the air. "Who would like some day-old fish?" he asked, and the two men shifted in their places awkwardly. Kuryakin watched the kid with the guitar slip past them on the curb. He had noticed. In the brief seconds that Kuryakin watched him in a blur, Kuryakin saw the poor kid's mouth open in disbelief, hand frozen above the sound hole of his guitar as he tried to peer into the window of the sleek sedan.

The fishy-smelling men in the car were not like Grieves. They didn't have that look of complete negation that reposes in the eyes of a true killer. They were mere recruits, Kuryakin thought, hired for whatever assets they could bring Grieves. Their cars, perhaps, or connections to local weapons dealers, science laboratories or equipment.

The man at the wheel drove slowly, always stopping if the lights were amber, and Kuryakin guessed he had been briefed to drive that way and that they were being followed by another car. Kuryakin strained for a look in the side view mirror, trying to recognize the car but without success. Once he thought he saw a black Mercedes 180 emblazoned with a small governmental-looking logo, but when they turned the corner there was only a bread truck behind them. The way the two men were sitting now, he and Dancer could drive their hands into the men's throats, smashing thoraxes. Then they could get out and run, weaving to avoid bullets from the car behind. But they did nothing. With any luck, their captors might prove something: that Grieves was still in Berlin, anxious to tidy up. And they needed Grieves, one way or another, to unravel this thing.

Kuryakin knew Berlin well from previous missions, and he tried to work out where they were heading. He guessed they were traveling northwest toward Mehlhausen.

Kuryakin looked over and gave her the slightest grin. "I am but mad north-north-west…."

Dancer got it, smiled back. "…I know a Thrush from a handsaw."

"Hey, shut up!" the man in the front passenger seat scolded.

Poor oaf, Kuryakin thought. No appreciation for culture and even less for tradecraft safeguards - no blindfolds? They were leading the two agents straight to their lair and all that was left was to report the location to to the Berlin U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. Somehow.

Soon they had left the business district behind them and were approaching a row of abandoned-looking houses.

Here they stopped. The driver got out, leaving them in the car, and opened the front door of a small cream-colored building near the end of the row. A wrought-iron sign hung on the gate with the words Trompe Le Monde in dark blue Roman script. A notice in the window proclaimed that all rooms were taken.

The door was opened by a burly man who looked past the driver toward the car. His eyes still on the car, the burly man came down the drive toward them, frowning with displeasure. He reminded Kuryakin of an old man he'd seen once hitting his child for dropping an ice-cream cone.

"You idiots. You didn't blindfold them well?" he said.

"Hey," one of the thieves grunted. "All Grieves said was they get here safe and not roughed up. Well, they're here, ain't they?"  
The man on the street looked into the car, and his angry expression changed not at all when he saw Kuryakin and Dancer safe and sound in the back seat. "Yeh, well, I'd a roughed 'em up anyway. Inside. Now. All of you."

They followed him into the building. The driver got back into the car. Kuryakin glanced down the road they had just traveled. Three hundred yards away, a black car, a BMW perhaps, or a Mercedes, had parked. A man in a trenchcoat was getting out.

Once in the foyer, the burly thug told them to wait, and the two men they'd traveled with thrust their guns menacingly at them. Then, without ceremony, the big thug came back and told them to follow him down the dimly lit corridor.

Past the front door rose a tiled archway and a duskiness of red shadows in dark passages. The place had an aura of old-time grandeur. It was a great place once, perhaps a center of the neighborhood up until the end of World War Two. It was a heap of littleness now.

Kuraykin could detect a faint scent of chlorine. There might be a pool somewhere. Kuryakin and Dancer followed the big gorilla into a back room, then through another door, and Kuryakin saw that he had guessed correctly. They walked into a high-ceiling swimming pool area, but the pool was completely empty, unfilled.

It was strange. Their captors had that look which is molded from the mystery of dawn and animated by the cold, and they regarded their prisoners with the remoteness of soldiers returned from a war. Neither hostile nor friendly, the men complacently escorted Kuryakin and Dancer into the dry pool, walking with them into the deep end. At the bottom of the slope stood a simple card table and two metal chairs.

"Agents Kuryakin and Dancer," came a voice from above them. "Cohorts in criminal enterprise. I like that sense of camaraderie in an agent."

Kuryakin craned his neck, saw a face above them. He scoured the area above his head with great care. The tiled edge was about four feet over their heads. He remembered the face, but he knew it at once from Solo's description of the killer eyes. Grieves.

"You seem distracted," Grieves said. "You're obviously not in a professional state of mind."

"Who are you and what do you want?" Kuryakin asked evenly, stalling for time. His mind was racing. He tried to take stock of the surroundings, but all he could see were tiles, a scant row of windows 20 feet or so above the head of Grieves.

Grieves looked like the stereotypical fat-cat politician, Kuryakin thought. An undistinguished statesman, at best. Dressed in a cheap-looking dark suit, white shirt, and plain black tie, Grieves had a round, red face topped by a few thin strands of hair slicked straight back. He looked like a man who drank soda pop as he drove to work, an American white-collar worker who sat behind a desk all day and ate at the same greasy spoon every noon. He reminded Kuryakin of men he had seen who had trouble climbing the single flight of stairs to their meager little New York City brownstone offices without becoming too short of breath. The man's eyes were beady and black beneath caterpillar eyebrows.

"Come, come, Mr. Kuryakin," the big man boomed. "Let's not play obtuse."

"No, that would be foolish."

"Yes, it would."

There was silence. Then, Kuryakin thought he heard a voice raised in anger, followed by a muffled groan. That voice -

Dancer spoke up. "Where's Napoleon Solo?"

"Why," Grieves said slowly, "I thought your friend shot him."

Kuryakin looked up to see the man break into a grin, all white teeth.

"I'm beginning to lose my sense of humor about this whole thing," Kuryakin said, letting the sarcasm in his voice resonate in the big empty pool.

But better to exercise some caution, Kuryakin thought. Better to give Grieves a little of what he wants before trying anything. Certainly, Grieves was a devious man, more cold-blooded than most Thrush operatives, Kuryakin recalled from the dossiers. Kuryakin remembered ruefully that Grieves had tricked agents Kelley and Murray in Mexico City, had so disoriented the men somehow that they'd ended bottled up inside the abandoned airshaft of an old apartment house. The place was wired with four pounds of C4, and Kelley and Murray had not had a chance.

What was with this guy? Perhaps Grieves was the class pariah as a child and now he was a Thrush pawn who liked to kidnap the popular kids and do evil experiments on them. Perhaps he and Dancer and Solo represented the brats who reminded him of those who once tormented him.

But no, Kuryakin thought, that was too simplistic, pretty much the cliché of every pulp-fiction writer's two-dimensional character. Nothing - no personality, action, motivation - was ever that simple. If you drew an analysis of your enemy this neat, you might make the mistake of reacting to a stereotype or a caricature and thus miss human elements of chance and surprise—maybe, sometimes, compassion and communication, even good will.

A weary silence dripped from the walls. Kuryakin strained to hear another sound like the moan he had heard previously. Kuryakin knew he and Dancer would have to play the situation close to the vest, tempting though it might have been to turn this little dance around, into an interrogation of Grieves. What was this zany plot involving a killer virus, the nonsense about guns, the madman's desire to rule the world? He cast a sidelong glance at Dancer, whose dark eyes seemed to return tacit acknowledgment of Kuryakin's assessment.

"How did you feel?" Grieves asked Kuryakin finally. "When Solo was shot, I mean?"

Kuryakin shrugged for effect. "Annoyed," he said.

Grieves put his head to one side and half-closed his eyes. "Surely you felt more than that? Surely you were upset? That would be more natural."

"Upset?" Kuryakin exhaled audibly, hoping to telegraph irritation over this line of inquiry. "Will that work for you?"

"Was Solo good to you? As a friend? Trustworthy, loyal, all that?"

"I suppose so," Kuryakin said helplessly.

"How did you spend the night, what was left of it, after the unfortunate incident?"

"Look, what is this?" Kuryakin asked hotly. "What are you after?"

"Solo's shooting was a mistake," Grieves reflected. "One in a series of mistakes. If my memory is right, it began with a blown cover, the one involving you as KGB, your pathetic ploy to infiltrate our operation. Then, there was the botched paperwork at the checkpoint. Then, pulling your weapon a moment too late, perhaps. And tsk, tsk, real bullets?! In such a volatile situation, one would think you'd employ the trademark namby-pamby U.N.C.L.E. sleeping dart. Really, Agent Kuryakin! What were you and Agent Solo thinking!?" He smiled deprecatingly. "That is quite a heavy rate of miscalculation. Makes one wonder if you'd had enough."

"What do you mean - enough?"

"Some might wonder if you were tired. Burned out." There was a long silence.

For God's sake, Kuryakin thought, it was like dealing with religious fanatics, the way some of these power-mad criminals spoke. What was Grieves up to?

"I'd like you to work for Thrush for a while," Grieves said matter-of-factly.

Kuryakin and Dancer remained taciturn. It was an effective ploy sometimes. It worked against dogged salesmen or tightlipped prisoners. Make them squirm with your own reluctance to speak. Make them hang on the expectation of the answer they want, and never utter a word. Sometimes the subtle pressure broke the inexperienced and the weak-willed, sometimes caused the unstable blurt some slip of the tongue, unwittingly dislodge some useful nugget, if not spill all the beans.

It was Grieves who finally broke the silence. "I would like to hire you for some light transportation duty, take our little invention across a few borders, meet a man about a horse, so to speak."

"That's very creative of you, Grieves," Kuryakin muttered. "This little invention. Same junk you so generously fed my bloodstream a few days ago?"

"Oh, our inventiveness would surprise you," Grieves said, grinning.

"I can't wait to hear all the tasty details," Kuryakin said. His neck was beginning to throb from staring up at Grieves.

"We can discuss the specifics at another time," Grieves said. "Right now I need to secure your cooperation."

"No," Kuryakin said flatly.

"And here I had hoped to impress you with the cleverness and sincerity of our operation," Grieves said.

"But I have some time to play with, Mr. Kuryakin, Miss Dancer." Grieves stepped back from the edge of the pool and into the darkness. The henchmen standing near the card table eyed Kuryakin and Dancer with new curiosity. One man had taken out a small kitchen knife, and during the conversation had pared his fingernails to the quick. The other man had plopped down a deck of cards on the table.

"I can let you think about our little proposition. But I expect your decision by tomorrow morning. Why don't we get together and talk, say, oh-seven-thirty hours, as we like to say? Please don't be late."

Grieves laughed heartily, and Kuryakin heard his footsteps fade away. Dancer let out a sigh of exasperation.

The henchmen raised their pistols and asked their captives to please turn around and put their hands up and against the wall.

Kuryakin grimaced, and noticed a barely perceptible twinge in Dancer's face. He knew they were both thinking the worst –- what was coming next, whips?

The wall was cold, but it was also dry, as if it had not been used in a long time. Kuryakin recalled reading that men condemned to death experienced sudden moments of elation. Kuryakin was aware of a comparable sensation. Relief, short-lived but consoling, sustained him for a few minutes. Then he felt afraid and hungry. He wouldn't be ready for whips. Neither would Dancer.

He was losing his edge. There was no other explanation.

He'd noticed it before, once in New York City, a couple of years ago, following the Utopia affair. It was early one morning when he was walking the short block to headquarters, from the bus stop toward the façade of Del Floria's tailor shop, hoping to miss the early press of pedestrians on the street. He had stepped off the curb into the crosswalk when a bus, maybe the one he'd just taken downtown, whipped from the side lane and missed him by a hair's breadth. He could still feel the wind created by the bus, that swish of air tickling the end of his nose. As the bus whipped past he saw in the corner of his eye three schoolchildren, two girls with red tresses and a dark-haired boy, walking down the street, waving and laughing, and his face was burning hot, his hands were shaking uncontrollably, his heart was palpitating wildly. He never crossed the street again without some corner of his memory recalling the happy children waving to him as the bus passed in front of his face. Alexander Waverly would have called the near miss most disturbing.

Kuryakin's arm muscles ached. He guessed that he and Dancer had had their arms raised against the cool side of the pool for as much as eight hours, maybe more, judging by the angle of the sun through those windows near the ceiling. Intermittently Grieves had stopped by to bring his hired guns at the card table weak-looking coffee and bland forms of nourishment - and to nag Kuryakin and Dancer about accepting his previous offer. They steadfastly refused, and then Grieves stopped coming around. He last had visited about three hours ago. Quitting time, obviously.

And time to act, Kuryakin thought wryly to himself. One of them had to escape, get out on the street, attract attention from politzei or get to a phone, let Berlin HQ know -

He gritted his teeth, stole a glance at Dancer. Perspiration ran down her cheeks, soaked the front of her white blouse beneath her black leather sport coat.

There had been no whips, no torture so far, beyond the endurance of hanging from the side of the empty pool.

The will to survive went hand-in-hand with the determination to complete a mission. Any agent who was wishy-washy about that idea flunked out or died early on, and Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin long had been fond of remarking that he bore a secret ambition to live to retirement.

Kuryakin had been watching their guards out of the corner of his eye. He and Dancer had had plenty of time to weigh the risks, and the risks looked less than formidable. Security had grown lax. The two men looked heavy-lidded and ashen, in spite of the caffeine and food, and their guns rested more than an arm's easy reach across the cheap little table. Hardly professional, these guys, Kuryakin thought. One man was finishing up a seemingly interminable game of solitaire. At the end of the game the man recollected the cards and prepared to shuffle them once more.

Escape. That was foremost. Kuryakin had had plenty of time, also, to consider that option. Escape when the men looked vulnerable, tired. Escape, then run without looking back, without thinking. Think later, when clear of the place. Then figure out the next move. Determine if Grieves sent any thugs in pursuit. If he did, shake the shadows, then circle back surreptitiously, conduct some spying of the truly clandestine kind on this troublesome Thrush nest. Or, call into headquarters, find Slate, initiate the commando strike.

Kuryakin looked back once more at the men at the card table and grinned at the little scene. So peaceful. Such faith in the ordinary stuff of life; the little things mattered, even in the middle of an evil Thrush satrap. He chuckled.

"What?" Dancer whispered, stiffening, her jaw tight.

"Nothing," Kuryakin whispered back. "I'm thinking it's high time we effected our escape."

"Go. You do it. Go."

There was a scraping noise behind them, and one of the men, the recruit with the severe manicure job, rose from his chair. "Hey, quiet. Nobody said you could talk."

"Nobody said we couldn't," Kuryakin retorted, looking back at the man but keeping his hands on the wall. Kuryakin had no time for graciousness or argument with Dancer over who would execute the plan.

Then the barrel of the man's gun poked into the region of Kuryakin's kidneys.

But Kuryakin didn't believe that Grieves wanted them dead. No. Kuryakin, Dancer, maybe even Solo, were too valuable, for whatever reason seemed to make sense to Grieves' demented mind.

Thrush seldom wanted U.N.C.L.E. agents dead, Kuryakin knew, unless there was some particular plot afoot, as in the affair a few years back when a pretender to Thrush power tried to garner credibility through an assassination attempt against U.N.C.L.E.'s top enforcement agent, Napoleon Solo. For anyone who mattered in Thrush, however, many things about the lives of U.N.C.L.E.'s top agents were common knowledge, including home addresses, where they worked, and their habits. If any Thrush operative wished to kill an U.N.C.L.E. agent, the undertaking would be a simple matter any time of the day, any day of the week.

"Quiet," the man said. Kuryakin could feel the barest influx of breath upon the nape of his neck. "I don't want to tell you -"

The sound and feel of the thug's breath was all Kuryakin needed. It measured the distance for him. Swiftly, he reared his head, butting against a human skull. There was a howl, followed by a curse, and the man tumbled backwards. Kuryakin whirled and saw him clutching his bloody face, writhing from the pain on the tile floor. The other thug struggled in his chair, caught between the chair and the tabletop, and the playing cards went flying as he tried both to stand and reach for his weapon.

In his peripheral vision, Kuryakin saw Dancer sag against the wall as the other man clumsily struggled to extricate himself from his chair, fumbled recklessly for his gun. In these situations, nothing was more frightening than the petty criminal too dumb or careless to properly handle his own loaded weapon.

Kuryakin's heart was tom-toming. There was a familiar popping sound, accompanied by hot metal singing past his left ear, and a square of tile an inch from his hand exploded in a shower of shrapnel and dust.

"Idiots!" The shout came from behind him, but no more shots.

Grimly Kuryakin pulled himself over the lip of the shallow end and ran for the exit, hit the corridor, pushed through a door like a blind man inside the unlit foyer, and the November wind bit through his open parka and at the skin under his shirt.

Dancer was back there. For one wild second a sense of doom dominated him. He didn't feel good about leaving another agent unprotected. But there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. Hadn't Napoleon Solo told him that more than once? Damn, Napoleon Solo; damn, Thrush -

Why had Thrush chosen to kill Napoleon Solo and let him go? It didn't make sense. There had to be some explanation.

Where could he go? No politzei in sight. Had to be police station close by, somewhere.

It was cold and clear, and a wind had begun to pick up as Kuryakin darted across Kaiserslautern Strasse. The headlights of cars came at him, and the noise of traffic was shrill and nervous as it clawed its brutal way. The stores and cinemas had closed but the discos and bars still drew throngs crowding the sidewalks. As three men tagged behind him, Kuryakin staged his progress by the street lamps, watching his shadow clarify each time it entered the next circle of light.

The men were walking swiftly behind him, but maintaining their distance. Why didn't they just shoot him? Maybe they were after more, maybe the location of Berlin headquarters, other secrets they or Grieves suspected Kuryakin possessed.

The cold wind persisted. Kuryakin turned abruptly down a side street to the right and then another to the left. They continued walking nearly all night, but the thugs behind him never showed a sign of letting up. Kuryakin stopped in several bars, trying to lose them in the crowd. He staggered like a drunk up to one of the bar counters in an establishment and obnoxiously tried to order six beers in a voice that had an edge a little too belligerent and angry for the happy crowd. He was hoping his misbehavior would prompt a call to the police, but the bartender merely laughed at his foolishness and a patron at his elbow, a balding old guy with bright eyes, encouraged him in the quaffing of two steins of dark beer. In the confusion, he left an unpaid bar tab, which he noticed the old gentleman graciously picked up, but Kuryakin never lost the three frowning faces jouncing around in the otherwise crowd of reveling Berliners.

When he later stumbled, half-drunk, into a street of narrow old houses with heavy porches and sash windows, he wondered about running up and inquiring about the use of a phone. When he tried to use a payphone earlier, he encountered two problems: Grieves had relieved him of his cash, and the goons stepped between him and the phone booth, menacingly waving their guns for him to go the other way, like traffic cops directing with their signal flashers.

The street now seemed empty. Kuryakin could hear no other footsteps but their own, crisp and short, the echo enhanced by the cold night. Kuryakin guessed that by now they were somewhere close to the rented bungalow, perhaps beyond it. He might have to double back. The Thrush thugs pressed on behind him, their shadows thrusting forward at him in the night, confident of their paths, urgent in purpose.

As they neared a main road, Kuryakin again heard the aggressive roar of traffic. Kuryakin fell once from exhaustion, propped himself up on his elbows, then struggled up and went forward again. If he could get to their garage and the rented Volvo, maybe he stood a chance of making it to headquarters by car. Or maybe Berlin had the foresight to equip the car with a communication device.

He moved forward quickly, nearly tripped several times. The sidewalk rounded a corner and he saw the railings of the garage complex and the bungalow's inner courtyard. He paused at the courtyard's wood gate, peered inside at the garage complex, and identified his garage door along a row of six garage stalls. Then, commanding his tired and drunken senses to stay wary and alert, he made his way across the wide slab of asphalt to the garage. The door was a heavy metal affair, corrugated steel, a thin strip of windows along the top.

Noiselessly, Kuryakin felt for the handle, turned the handle, and lifted the door, which gave easily and revealed the parked Volvo U.N.C.L.E. headquarters had provided the two agents. He stepped inside and looked back. He seemed to have momentarily eluded his shadows. He pulled the door down.

Warm. Safe. But not getting anywhere fast, that was for sure.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a package, scratched a match. Its short flame cast a pale glow over the black Volvo. He moved the match back and forth. The car might be rigged, but where would the bomb be planted? Then he saw the telltale wire sticking from the chassis, beneath the driver's door. He flicked out the match as the flame reached his fingers, bent down, and pressed the wire gingerly between his right thumb and forefinger, like a doctor testing a vein.

Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin scraped his knuckles against metal and thought about blood mixing with oil. Crouching on the grimy garage floor littered with crushed Winstons and Kools, Kuryakin tugged and pulled. From beneath the chassis of the Volvo, he produced a bundle of wires wrapped neatly around a metal core.

He held the bomb like a grapefruit in the dim light of the garage, examining the apparatus with the detached objectivity that befitted the scientist he was. Deadly. Expertly created, too. Sleek, efficient. Nothing extraneous or sloppy. A military-like precision he had not often seen in Thrush creations of the sort.

The garage had a cemetery silence. He looked around. There was no alternative but to return to the house and acquiesce to the madman's demands. At the very least, he needed to get back in time to save Dancer.

But why the bomb? Grieves wanted the U.N.C.L.E. agents alive. Didn't he? He set the lethal thing down carefully on the garage floor.

He was suddenly worried. Maybe Grieves was more unstable than he had thought. Maybe his thugs had confused the orders, or were acting on their own. Or maybe under someone else's countermanding instructions.

It was at just about this time that he began to realize that the empty pool and the building were expendable. They would probably never need to use it again, once they were through with him and Dancer. Thrush favored a "scorched earth" policy: they liked to burn their bridges behind them, once they had used them for a purpose. Burn them. Or blow them up.

He looked at his watch. Ten to six. Dammit. No time to get word to Berlin. He'd have to go back to the pool before the deadline Grieves had set, or anything could happen to Dancer. He tried not to think of the young U.N.C.L.E. agent enduring Thrush incarceration half a city away.

He checked and saw that the keys were in the ignition. He walked to the garage door and yanked on the handle. But there was a problem. The door wouldn't budge. The door was stuck. Or, somebody had locked him in. Kuryakin tried to assemble his thoughts.

He had the terrible sinking feeling that he was not about to be punctual with his return.

The side door. No. Handle and hinges rusted tight. He ran his fingers along the edges, searching for a practicable opening. He glanced around the garage and surveyed the panel of small windows at the top of the garage door, old tools, rags. He grabbed a rusty screwdriver and jammed the flat end into the doorframe, twisted, pulled, tugged. No good. He looked at the bomb on the floor. Well, if nothing else, he'd give these goons something to talk about. Two dead U.N.C.L.E. agents in one week. Wouldn't that make for a happy topic over coffee and strudels this morning.

He opened the Volvo's driver-side door, then went back to the bomb and picked the bomb up gently with both hands, carried the bomb to the Volvo, placed the bomb on the leather-upholstered passenger-side seat. He slipped behind the wheel, turned the ignition. The motor roared to life. He picked up the bomb again, got out of the car. The Volvo was purring, so quietly that Kuryakin had a hard time detecting the noise of the engine. But the motor was running, all right; the stall was quickly filling with the unmistakable odor of deadly exhaust fumes.

He placed the bomb on top of the hood that covered the finely tuned engine. But he had miscalculated. Vibrations, however undetectable to the eye, made the little muscle of wire and metal slide quickly down the gleaming metal, and he had to dash around, then pick up and carry the falling bomb off like a football in a mad touchdown run.

He would need to place the bomb farther up on the hood, closer to the windshield, to steal more time. He did so, then turned his attention to his escape route.

Panic clutched his stomach. He scrunched his shoulders into his neck, brought his forearms in front of his neck and face, and brought his hands toward the top of his head. Then, leading with his right shoulder, he focused his energy on punching through a middle spot in the thick wood door. He kept his arms tight in place, braced for a landing, and ran at the door. He struck his shoulders against the door. On the third try, it worked. Kuryakin fell forward and his face hit cold concrete.

He stood up and shook. He brushed off splinters of wood before opening his eyes to find himself standing in a replica of the garage he'd left, complete with another luxury car. The Volvo next door was running so smoothly he could hardly hear the engine, and he would be a dead man if he didn't move fast. This front door, too, was locked. He lunged at the side door. It held and he lunged again and then again. He tried to remember how many more doors he had to break through to reach the last door to the outside. He broke through this door and found himself in another garage like the one he'd left, along with the same locked and jammed doors. He broke through the next door and tumbled out onto a frost-crusted patch of grass.

He sprang to his feet, then flattened against the garage wall. To his left, he spotted his next destination - the orange Opel Rekord. He never liked complicating the life of an innocent bystander, but Waverly would reimburse the poor man or woman fully and then some.

The night was ending, the cold ground becoming brighter than the sky. His shoulder throbbed from breaking through the doors, and he was thankful for whatever cushioning his heavy parka had provided.

Where was that bomb?

When would it go off?

Then, off in the distance, a twig on pavement snapped.

He peeked around the corner. Three stooges were poking their heads above the brick wall that lined the perimeter of the courtyard. They stared at the tendrils of blue exhaust smoke curling up from under the garage door four stalls down.

The explosion cracked the tension like a nut. Kuryakin ducked back a second after the fireball mushroomed from the garage door and a hail of shattered glass and twisted metal rained upon the asphalt. A piece of masonry sang past his ear.

Kuryakin cut for the Opel Rekord.

Bent low, he sprinted toward the street. He took ten giant steps and then sprawled face down on the grass at the sound of the first clicking trigger behind him. Gunfire sounded, and bullets hit with wet splats into the sod around him. He had to keep moving.

Something flickered, and from the corner of his eye he saw one of the thugs coming around the corner of the garage. He came up on one knee, ran, fell forward, came up to both feet, and threw himself in against the parked Opel as the pistols whined, snapping at his heels.

Kuryakin rolled under the Opel, duly bruising himself on a transmission drive and rolling through gravel that bit into his elbows and knees. The fall of footsteps. He heard yelling, saw feet padding across the grass, coming straight at the Opel.

Kuryakin reached up with one hand, grabbed the cold steel of the door handle, and opened the car on the side away from the garage. Unlocked! (Luck!) He hauled himself up into the car and slammed the door, keeping his head low.

No key in the ignition. No time for disappointment or delay, though, because he had not expected one. A strip of metal on the floor. (More luck!) He picked it up and fished with his free hand for the right set of wires under the dash, shorted the ignition, and pressed the starter. The sedan coughed, shook itself, then rattled to life.

Kuryakin already had the car in gear before he pulled himself up under the steering wheel. He glanced back. American magazines and garish paperback spy novels littered the back seat.

He also saw a group of men framed in the back window. They were standing in their pistol-firing stances where the Opel had been parked. They fired their small arms, and bullets shattered the back window and embedded into metal. The car lurched forward onto a wide and empty street. He stepped down hard on the gas.

 _"Do svidonya,"_ he whispered.

Other cars might come in pursuit, but probably not soon. Those guys had been on foot, like Kuryakin, and no doubt they were as exhausted as he was after their all-night romp through the streets of West Berlin.

He heard guns firing in the distance, and he felt empty, tired. He had wasted a lot of time.

Kuryakin gripped the wheel, mentally begging five more miles of speed from the old Opel.

Checking his rearview mirror, he noticed with a jolt that he was being followed. He saw side streets whirring past in the wind of transit, knowing that he could lose the cars only hitting those offshoots.

No. Too risky. He knew these parts. But he did not want to chance unexpected road construction, traffic problems, a kindergarten procession in a crosswalk heading towards an auditorium. Too many variables. He would fare better on this bigger street. And, ahead, an opportunity was coming his way. A beer truck was pulling onto the street.

It would take precise timing. He held his breath, exhaled, then whipped the Opel to the left, pulled in front of the terrified driver, and pressed the pedal down. He tore in front of the truck. The markings flashed past: _EIN BIT, BITTE! BITBURGER PILS._

Then, the truck driver - poor guy - panicked, spun the steering wheel, and stalled the truck across the width of the street. Kuryakin looked over his shoulder and saw a crowd already gathered in the street around the vehicle. The traffic behind the stalled beer truck - the traffic that included his deadly pursuers - was stopped, unable to pass.

They would still be in pursuit. He had purchased some time, maybe a few precious miles. But there would be nothing easier to spot than this orange target.

He whipped around a corner, climbing a steep hill, plunging downward. He jerked the car around another corner, slammed on the brakes. He was already out of it as it rolled to a stop under a parking verboten sign. He ran across the walk, ducked behind a newsstand, and dashed toward a slowing metro car on the underground tracks.

Kuryakin's lungs were beginning to ache as he ran these last few blocks. It was quiet in the little tree-lined neighborhood Kuryakin found himself in. Again, too quiet?

His sixth sense, the warning, went off in his brain-the split-second sensitivity to danger, even potential danger, that had kept him alive longer than most enforcement agents U.N.C.L.E. had ever had, except for Solo.

Ahead stood the concrete two-story building, the Trompe Le Monde. It seemed to be on fire because the first sunlight glowed on the old wavy glass of the windows. The front gate gave in with a creak.

He had failed in alerting Berlin headquarters. He dare not fail now in saving an U.N.C.L.E. agent's life.

Kuryakin clapped his right hand to his left shoulder in a primitive reflex to instinctively withdraw the weapon that wasn't there, the phantom Special whose presence lingered eerily like a wounded soldier's missing limb.

Kuryakin approached with practiced caution, head turning left and right. He drew a breath and opened the front door, proceeded into the darkness, blinking, then turned a tiled corner and rounded a corner to the corridor that led to the big empty pool Grieves had converted into their interrogation chamber. He rounded another corner and entered the high-ceilinged pool area.

Dancer was exactly where he had left her, arms still raised against the wall. The card table and chairs were gone. Four sentries now circled the beleaguered female agent. They looked poised, vigilant little Thrush soldiers, small pistols in the ready position. Quick on the trigger this time, no doubt, Kuryakin thought. Dancer seemed devoid of even the semblance of movement, as quiet as a still wine. He was flooded with a sense of renewed veneration for this U.N.C.L.E. agent; she had reserves of endurance and will that contradicted her willowy figure. He felt oafish for having deserted her in this uncertain lair, for having rendered her victim to a rogue's dulled and unsubtle moral sense, to this long and insidious brand of torture.

A light, to his right, flickered, then flashed on in full brilliance. Kuryakin instinctively backed up, startled, then stared in disbelief at a fantastic scene that seemed sealed in the translucent amber of dreams. Framed behind the wire-mesh window of a little poolside office, Napoleon Solo sat slumped over a heavy wood table, almost as if involved in some dreary business conference with the two other figures, Grieves and some other man. But Solo was less than animated, a straw man. Solo was staring blankly; his eyes, two blank holes in a pasty mask, were fixed at a middle point on the table. His unshaven face hung forward, his chin resting on his chest. Trails of crusted blood smeared his white dress shirt.

Grieves turned and smiled. "I guess it's about time for our morning meeting," said the madman to the Russian law enforcement agent for U.N.C.L.E.


	4. Section IV and Epilog

20

SECTION IV : "This Is A Way To Get Killed."

 _Somewhere in West Berlin, Sometime in November 1971_

The door of the lighted office stood ajar; through ceiling windows high above the pool, a skeleton glow came from the outside arc lights and intercrossed the darkness of the cool interior. Kuryakin, having entered with catlike tread, meant to steal upon his prey in darkness, but he came to a standstill and went rigid in the shaft of light projected from the office door. Not much time to think things over. Only react. Instinctively, he wanted to react by lowering his body stance, bending his legs, touching the tiled floor with his fingertips, a panther crouching and on the brink of a fight. Instead he stood still, blinked in the hard light, blinked, too, as if in mental rejection of something as untrue.

Some ten paces ahead, Napoleon Solo, through the glass of a wire-mesh window, narrowed his eyes as if trying to bring them into focus on Kuryakin, who felt relief flood through his veins. There he was. A little less dapper for wear and tear, true enough, with several days of beard-growth, white shirt smeared with blood, hair greasy and fallen over his forehead. But alive.

There was one overhead light, a bare bulb, and it cast harsh shadows upon his old friend. Glints of gunmetal on the table, points of light in the eyes of two men who sat with Napoleon Solo between them: one was Grieves, the other a man Kuryakin did not know. Grieves had his hand on a gun lying before him on the table. So did the other man. Kuryakin knew the make: the Walther P-38, the weapon U.N.C.L.E. modified into the Specials and issued to its enforcement agents.

Grieves pushed back from the table and stood up, gun in hand, to give Kuryakin an inquiring once-over. He apparently found humor in what he saw. "Mr. Kuryakin, you look awful," he said, laughing. "Evidently, in the Ukraine, Eagle Scouts fail to instruct their young Communist recruits about the futility of running around in circles." Grieves continued to smile at his own joke.

With a yank that made the legs chatter and screech, he pulled out the only empty chair, placing it four feet from the table. He motioned with his Walther that this was where he wanted Kuryakin, and sat back down. Kuryakin obeyed, resuming the role of prisoner.

Sitting down next to Grieves, Kuryakin thought it incredible how normal these criminals often looked. Even in light that cast cliffs and chasms over his features, Grieves had a round mild face, and an easy disarming smile, like that of a bank loan officer who had not quite decided whether you were worthy of your credit history. But his eyes were large and cold, toad-like.

"Kuryakin," the other man piped up, with feigned interest. He had one of those gold-throated radio voices. "That's Slavic. Russian, is it not?"

Irritated, Kuryakin stared at the man. "It's a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring."

The man let out a surprised guffaw - a very American sound, Kuryakin

thought - and looked at Grieves, who only looked confused.

The tired agent clasped his hands in his lap and sat straight, easing his back and sifting through his memory for a name to put with the man's face. It was a handsome enough face, muscular, with a stubborn line to his thin mouth. Eyes brown and small. Irish, perhaps. Of indeterminate age - anywhere from 25 to 45, Cary Grant type, like Roger O. Thornhill in _North by Northwest_.

Somewhere not too far off, drops of liquid made mossy mutterings. Water, perhaps.

Bringing his thoughts back to assessing the situation, Kuryakin glanced sideways at his partner for a sign. They shared a subtle communication, under usual circumstances. But this time Kuryakin felt no connection, just a sickening feeling at the sight of the profuse sweat shining on his partner's face, the ashen hue replacing the signature tan. He could see Solo's pulse throbbing, swift and irregular. Kuryakin's mind went into a turmoil of anger, the eye of his personal hurricane centered on Grieves: fraud, cheat, a man willing and ruthless enough to kill for stupid greed, or blind power.

Kuryakin looked steadily at Grieves, slowly pushing down his anger. It was no good becoming emotionally outraged. Coolness was the only way to deal with Grieves. "Tell me what happened," Kuryakin said, forcing evenness into his tone. "I'm not a big believer in the science fiction about brainwashing, but I can't see any other explanation why I might pull the trigger on my partner."

Now Grieves tried out a sympathetic tone. "This has been nibbling away at the core of your self-esteem and sanity," Grieves said, looking serious. "I can tell."

"Thank you for being so kind. I need kindness now," Kuryakin muttered sarcastically, feeling defeated. He understood now that there was no alternative but to stay, face the test, and glean whatever details he could of the plot. On no occasion would there be any opportunity to reverse the situation, he decided. Primary rule: don't start a fight you can't finish. He was in rough shape, having run around more than twelve hours without getting anywhere, and exhaustion was taking its toll, making every muscle ache. Moreover, he was outnumbered; wrestling for one of the guns would turn the room into a deathtrap. And, one look at Solo, his eyes glazed and his skin gray, was enough to convince Kuryakin that his partner would be worthless - and only be in harm's way - if a fight broke out.

"Ill. Illya."

It was Solo.

"P-Plea. Please," Solo stammered, like a deranged patient finding out his mouth worked. "Illya, meet my, ... my ... friend," Solo whispered hoarsely, licking his chapped lips. "An old friend. Deck ... co ... corated. Kor ... Korean War."

The man Solo had called an old friend shifted uncomfortably. "Keep quiet, Napoleon, or the deal is off."

Only slightly raising an eyebrow, Kuryakin looked at his haggard partner. Deal? What was this about a deal? In the shadows, one side of Solo's face seemed to collapse, as if the effort to keep up appearances had finally failed and daylight optimism had abandoned him.

Grieves cleared his throat, as if preparing for great truths. "I realize this situation must generate an ethical paradox," Grieves said calmly. "Still, you must know that an exchange of resources is the only viable scenario."

This was ridiculous, Kuryakin thought. Introducing ethics in the middle of a Thrush satrap! It was like pondering the morality of fishing while riding on a shark boat.

"Please tell me you wish to cooperate, Mr. Kuryakin," Grieves said after some silence. "Otherwise, well, our lovely femme fatale might find herself - how does the saying go? - in over her head?" He said this in his low voice and surveyed the gloom of the empty pool, and now, in the cool half-darkness of the place, he did seem a bit like a toad.

Kuryakin had caught sight of the situation in the pool's deep end. And he knew they would still be there, the four Thrush hoods remaining like statues, their Brownings pointed directly toward the shadow that was April Dancer. It had struck Kuryakin that the poor woman seemed frozen in a clumsy position of obsequiousness, as though she were humbling herself to some ancient idol. Kuryakin could tell that the terrible position had cost her. Her long hair, fallen limply over her shoulders, was drenched with perspiration, her breath sketchy.

"Let her go," Kuryakin said flatly.

"Of course, Mr. Kuryakin." Grieves smiled. "Mr. Solo has used his powers of persuasion, let us say, to convince us of the sanctity of Mr. Waverly's little experiment in female espionage. We're ready to seal the deal, Mr. Kuryakin."

"Then he leaves now, with her," Kuryakin demanded. "Let her take Solo for medical treatment."

Grieves leaned back in his chair, glanced from Kuryakin to Solo and back at Kuryakin, then chuckled. "I do admire your stoic Russian tenacity, my pathetic Communist friend."

Kuryakin eyed Grieves coolly. "You are aware, of course, that U.N.C.L.E. would hardly ignore the murder of its top agent. If somebody from U.N.C.L.E. did not avenge the death, somebody else, somewhere, would. Napoleon Solo has many - "

"Yes, yes, yes," Grieves interrupted, disdainfully waving with his gun hand. "Your wonderful Napoleon Solo has many friends all over the world who would scour the planet to hunt down his killer, blah, blah."

Silently the agent logged the astonishing familiarity of his words for consideration.

"Agent Solo is worth more alive than dead," Grieves said, staring intently at Kuryakin's chest, as if a curious transition were taking place there. "I know, I know. You want to tell me that you and Napoleon are only two agents. That you are expendable. That Alexander Waverly would never let two of his agents, or any distrust between his agents, bring down the Command."

Kuryakin was silent. Seeing no light of welcome on his enemy's face, Grieves went on with the lecture a little louder, so it echoed inside the large and nearly empty pool area: "You see, everybody has his or her pressure point, Mr. Kuryakin. You just need to find the personal weakness and squeeze."

No good arguing. Besides, Kuryakin tried to direct his mind to the premise, but it was like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. Kuryakin knew he could not have shot Solo. Whatever poison had subverted his mind and Kuryakin, an expert marksman, was convinced some small region of reason, some piece of sanity - whatever poison subverted his mind that terrible night in Berlin - had kept him from discharging a fatal shot, even as inexplicable impulses had compelled him to murder. Based on the location and pattern of the bloodstains on Solo's shirt, Kuryakin suspected that Solo's wound was serious, but, at least in and of itself, not lethal. Still, no gunshot wound was benign. Kuryakin knew the horrible outcomes of untended wounds. Fever, malaise, headache, anorexia. Seeding of the bloodstream that could lead to pneumonia, lung abscess, ostoemyelitis, septicemia, endocarditis, meningitis, or brain abscess.

He had a sinking sensation as he reexamined the bloody mess on Solo's shirt. "Let's get on with it, Grieves," Kuryakin said impatiently.

"Delivery vehicle's out back, BMW, sedan, four-door," Grieves said, then added sardonically, "An early model, I'm afraid, but what can you expect these days."

"Just what merchandise am I delivering for you, Grieves? No humanitarian consignment of medical supplies, I imagine."

"You think you deserve a summation of why you're doing this. I suppose it goes to motivation." Grieves smirked at Solo's mysterious old war friend, then turned a sober face to Kuryakin. "Look around. We're the men with the guns. I don't think you need more motivation than that, do you?"

"Fine," Kuryakin said bitterly. "I'm not happy to do your dirty work, but my options seem fairly limited."

"Wonderful. Payment on delivery." Greives nodded toward Solo.

"Why us, Grieves? Why two operatives for U.N.C.L.E. for your work?"

Grieves looked at Kuryakin with his cold eyes. "Allow me a certain sense of poetic justice. Another twist of the knife blade."

A quick grab for the gun, pull the trigger without even thinking, watch the big round eyes go wide with surprise. Kuryakin wanted nothing more right now than to see this man die. Instead, he breathed deeply, suppressing his anger. "Fine. Call off your jackals," Kuryakin said. "But, before we embark on our little trip, we could use some food, and some rest."

"Ah, Mr. Kuryakin, this is no time to be nodding off like a freckle-faced kid on a fishing raft. Time to make tracks for another part of the world."

Kuryakin paused for effect. "If your plans included me as your errand boy, why did you try to kill me last night?"

Grieves looked surprised. "Kill you?"

"Come on, Grieves. The car bomb in the bungalow garage? A good one, too. And then your men chased me, shot at me."

Grieves stiffened, then relaxed himself. But he could not hide the redness that swelled over his face as he eyeballed his collaborator, but the Roger Thornhill-lookalike shrugged indifferently. Then, with a trace of that easy smile resurfacing, Grieves faced Kuryakin again. "There have been some regrettable mishaps," Grieves said calmly. "But the disturbing developments of late will soon bear sweet fruit."

Reluctantly leaving behind a well-guarded Napoleon Solo, Dancer and Kuryakin were escorted to the washroom by two armed men, who locked them, one at a time, into the simple closet and stood outside the door, letting them out at a knock from the inside. Next, they were taken to a kitchen, where they were fed, on coffee and sandwiches, before being rousted out into the blinding midday sunlight of a steep little street behind the house. A big green glossy BMW had been driven up, and now the car stood there, shining in the winter daylight, its doors open like wings, its motor running.

"We've no luggage," Kuryakin said, squinting at Grieves and the other man. "Not even a toothbrush or razor. And we are completely unarmed."

Solo's friend from Korea laughed. "No American should leave home without a gun, right!"

Grieves laughed, too. "We Americans are a strange lot, aren't we?" Grieves said. "We travel to foreign countries and complain how hard it is to find a decent hamburger." He faced the two U.N.C.L.E. agents. "Are you ready otherwise?"

Dancer shrugged. "Suppose so. Have you any cigarettes?"

"No," Grieves said, "but you can get some on the road. Stop at any petrol station along the designated route. You'd better look through this," he added, and handed Kuryakin a small black leather folder. Kuryakin opened the folio and glanced through a car registration, a roadmap with their route traced zealously in red marker (the red line ran from Berlin through Poland and stopped at the Russian border), and two American passports. The passports were made out in their own names with their own photographs mounted on them, both embossed by a deep-press U.S. governmental seal running across the corner. They were neither old nor new; Kuryakin's described the Russian U.N.C.L.E. agent as a courier, and gave his status as single. The details impressed Kuryakin; he had to give them that much. But, holding the bundle of documents, Kuryakin felt slightly nauseated. It was like looking in the mirror one morning and seeing that overnight you were beginning to grow old; whatever was happening, you couldn't help it, and things would never be the same again.

"We are declaring ourselves Americans traveling in the usually prohibited Eastern bloc," Kuryakin stated blandly.

"Diplomatic couriers. You should do all right," Grieves said.

"How about some cash?" Kuryakin asked. "It's a long trip."

"You won't need any," Grieves said. "This one's on the house."

They consumed the long kilometers in fatigued silence. Kuryakin, voluntarily the primary driver, led them along Eastern European roadway, bumpy and narrow, that jostled their noisome cargo, raising a clatter from the trunk like the sound of several dozen Mason jars jiggling around. Sullen proprietors dutifully dispensed free fuel, gratis cigarettes, and hot flavorless coffee in the standard Styrofoam cup. All night tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful Christmas lights, loomed in the darkness and thundered their sedan. And, next day, the inside of the car would alternate, at the whim of a temperamental heater, between being a furnace and a meat locker. Kuryakin had seen what the uniquely intimate confines of a vehicle could do to a couple of operatives on a stakeout, how his and Napoleon Solo's personalities could stand in deep relief - cool, cranky, spacey, scary. But now the prison of metal threw into perspective the real need for regular personal hygiene - Kuryakin became acutely aware that it had been days since either had enjoyed the luxury of a hot bath.

"I don't think I want to marry you anymore," Kuryakin said, which elicited a jolt from his companion, and the barest of smiles. But the smile was the first sign that the young female agent might be okay after her long trial with Grieves. "You don't smell clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."

"You're one to talk, Blanche. You don't exactly smell like a springtime orchard, you know," Dancer rejoined, but her smile didn't last. Kuryakin knew what she was going through, the feelings of betrayal over the desertion of a wounded agent, the treasonable surrender to an enemy. Lesser hazards had done in the best agents. Her face turned away and she pressed her forehead against the side window.

But there was nothing more they could do now but get on with their task. With any luck, and if things went well, they might be able to risk a phone call, even on an unsecured line. Call Waverly, pinpoint the Satrapy for Mark Slate.

The traffic on the highway was light; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between their curious green car and its imperious black shadow - as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glasslike virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind them looked like a pale display dummy, and his sedan seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with Kuryakin and Dancer's shabby vehicle. Kuryakin knew they were many times weaker than the mannequin's splendid, lacquered machine, so that he did not even attempt to outspeed him.

With bewildering ease, the Thrush shadow switched from one vehicle to another. The technique implied the existence of garages specializing in "stage-automotive" operations, and every time Kuryakin pulled into a petrol station, a few minutes later a dark sedan - once a black Mercedes, then a navy blue Saab, another time a blood-red BMW - would glide alongside next to the two agents, Kuryakin pumping gas and Dancer wiping down the windows. The mysterious driver, from inside the dark interior of his sleek car, would fix Kuryakin and Dancer with his stare. But he never needed to refuel, never stepped from his vehicle.

They climbed long grades and rolled down again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow schoolchildren, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black marked on the roadmap from Grieves, and no matter how and where they drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscrossing streets - at half-past-six in a factory town - was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned Kuryakin and Dancer on, then with the same hand, cut off their shadow. A score of cars were launched in between them, and Kuryakin sped on, and deftly turned onto a narrow lane.

When, after a lot of deliberate meandering, Kuryakin returned to the designated route, their shadow had disappeared. At the next petrol station, Dancer and Kuryakin walked briskly into the store. One man at the counter. No customers. Dancer took the lookout position at the door, and Kuryakin grabbed the phone on the counter and dialed furiously. The proprietor, a little man - balding but young, with a dark mustache - was shaking his head and nervously glancing toward the dark windows.

"Emergency," Kuryakin whispered to the man, before hearing on the other end of the line a velvety female voice replaced at once by an angry greeting from Alexander Waverly.

"Where the devil are you?" Waverly growled, his voice from several thousand miles away filtering through a wash of static. "Nobody seems to understand the meaning of urgency anymore. I expected to hear from you and Miss Dancer hours ago. When I send my best troubleshooters into the field, I expect expediency and I expect investigative intelligence delivered in a timely fashion to this office. Understood, Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Of course, sir." Kuryakin smiled. Hearing the speech of the old Englishman who had lived in many lands other than England, Kuryakin felt a bit homesick for the New York City headquarters, where it had all begun for him a little more than a decade ago. He could almost see Waverly, the old aristocratic-looking bloodhound, bushy eyebrows and all. A veteran of more than 50 years of service in British and American intelligence, Waverly was the man who, for Kuryakin, was U.N.C.L.E. The old fox was probably now pushing away from his table and the documents he had been studying to rise and cross to the windows that distinguished his office from all other rooms in New York City's headquarters building. He could see him, all tweedy and baggy kneed, but a man with a brain quick as a scorpion and just as dangerous, a composure that never ruffled, and the ability to command men. A man very alone. Kuryakin wondered briefly how many times these calls had come in to the old man who had devoted his life to the pursuit of securing the safety and dignity of mankind. How many false starts along the way had the old man faced? How many setbacks, defeats?

Kuryakin quickly pinpointed the location of the Berlin operation, relayed what he had learned from Grieves and about Solo's condition, and passed on their Russian terminus.

Dancer interrupted. "I see headlights," she hissed. "They're coming."

"It's imperative you proceed as Grieves has directed. I'll call in a favor with my Russian friends -"

And then the connection was cut off by a storm of static.

Kuryakin slammed down the receiver and shoved the phone across the counter, and then, executing a smooth about-face from the counter and drawing a deep breath, he followed Dancer out of the gas station store in a casual and unhurried stroll. Headlights swept across the asphalt lot from a hearse-like sedan nosing toward the station.

They pulled back onto the road, and the car followed as before, maintaining its distance.

Dancer adjusted her seat back and folded her arms, gazing at the roadside, and Kuryakin realized it would be all over in Berlin. Mark Slate would have honed his strike team to perfection. The planned raid would unfold with prescribed and unerring routine: Waverly's order arriving instantaneously by satellite communication; flak-jacketed men and women strapping on their assault weaponry; their human target, oblivious of the truckload of crackerjack sharpshooters hurtling through Berlin's bitter night, taking a last self-satisfied breath before all hell broke loose around him.

When they pulled up to the shack at the Russian border crossing, a long train was standing in a station and the platform was empty. Winter. Night. The frozen sky was flooded with red. Only a woman's weeping could be heard. She was pleading for something from an officer in a stone coat. A black Mercedes, it, too, flooded with red from the setting sun, was parked in front of the shack. German Federation plates, government type. Engine running.

The passport and papers check went quickly. Then, the officer had Kuryakin park next to the Mercedes, into whose trunk Kuryakin, under close supervision, transferred the goods from his trunk. It was the first time he had lain eyes on their mysterious cargo, and the prize looked to be no more than a case of brown German beer bottles.

Flames of cold flickered across his skin. After he closed first the trunk lid of the Mercedes and then that of his own, he noticed a man climbing out of the Mercedes from the driver's side. The man walked over to Kuryakin as Dancer got out of their BMW, apparently having noticed the development.

"Welcome to Russia," the man said.

Kuryakin recognized the voice. The unidentified man, the third man at the table, Solo's so-called friend from the war. He wore a long dark overcoat, open slightly at the top, and beneath that, a fresh suit. Kuryakin looked but could not tell what kind his handgun was, whether he still had the Walther. The man had it holstered to the left, under the suit, judging from the hang of the overcoat fabric.

Two Russian officers huddled out of the wind on the platform in the shadow of the black train. They stamped their feet for warmth, and drew on their cigarettes. The cigarettes had no filter, and after the officers exhaled, they would have to pick off bits of tobacco that were stuck to their lips and tongue. Kuryakin watched them as they momentarily quit smoking and looked over at him. But then Loveless leaned back against the side of his car, and it seemed like nothing serious was going to happen, so the officers went back to work on their cigarettes.

"You've done your job, you're clear now," the man said. "You're to proceed to your safe house. In Siverski."

"Who the hell are you?" Kuryakin asked.

"Lancaster Loveless. Central Intelligence."

Loveless. Solo had mentioned the name over the years.

"Central Intelligence, huh? Tell me something, Mr. Loveless," Dancer said, her teeth chattering; it was bitterly cold. "Don't you remember a time when you could tell the good guys from the bad?"

Loveless laughed quietly and said, "Oh, my involvement with Thrush was merely a means to an end."

"Naturally, we would be remiss if we failed to press for some details about that, er, end," Kuryakin said.

"My dear Mr. Kuryakin, if you think I'm about to tell you everything, let me save us all some time," Loveless said with a grin. "I'm not." Loveless turned to go back to his car; the snow under his feet had a soda cracker crunch. "Remember this," he said, "all agents defect, and all resistors sell out. It's the sad truth."

Kuryakin strode up behind the man and grabbed him brusquely by the elbow, and Loveless whirled, an instinctive reaction.

"Ah, Mr. Kuryakin, careful. I've got the gun." Loveless nodded to the officers, who had just stiffened perceptibly. "You think a bullet wound would get much attention around these parts?" Kuryakin heard the Russian officers speaking on the platform. Then Loveless's face softened. "What fools we are, Illya, talking like this - as if I'd do that to you - or you to me." He shook loose of Kuryakin's hold on his elbow, climbed in behind the steering wheel. "Leave this alone. You will learn all you will need to know in short order. I'm very sure my superior will share the appropriate information with your old man."

"Which superior is that, Loveless?" Kuryain muttered. "The one from the CIA, or from the KGB? Or from Thrush?"

"I've stayed true to my school," Loveless said with an unctuous smile. "Besides, I'm not hurting anybody's freedom by what I do. Anyway, the dead are happier dead, don't you think? They certainly wouldn't miss much here, poor devils," he added with an odd touch of genuine pity, as the Russian officers lit another cigarette from the ones they were smoking, all stone coats and faces of the doomed-to-be-victims, tired pleasure-starved ghost faces, and peered over at the group of Americans. "I could cut you in, you know. It would be useful."

"What a work a man is... ."

"The Russian knows his Hamlet," Loveless said as he started to pull the car door shut. "Please, Mr. Kuryakin, I am not your pupil."

After Loveless's sedan finally backed up and pulled away into the night, Kuryakin looked helplessly at Dancer, started toward their car, then paused under the high light that guarded the near corner of the railway platform. What he saw at his feet puzzled him. On the whiteness that had already fallen small dark spots were swarming like gnats. They darted this way and that and then vanished. There seemed to be a center where they would vanish. The phenomenon seemed totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eased as the rational explanation came to him. It had begun to snow, very lightly, and these were shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. His feet began to hurt from being cold and his thoughts turned sickly in his mind. As if leaving a cramped room he restored his mind to the breadth of the border station, where large traveling eddies of snow had begun to sway and stride from the sky with a sort of ultimate health.

He crawled into the cave of the car with Dancer and shoved his cold boots under a vent of heat. Hurriedly the U.N.C.L.E. agent backed out of the lot and headed up the drive toward the main road. On their way to Siverski, a few cars came from the other direction, and a few came up from behind and passed them. The snow let up after a while, and clouds of stars seemed to rise from the wilderness, lighting the treetops in a cool fire. They saw a castle nestled in distant hills, like a scene from a child's storybook. Slowly, the night closed in around them as light from farmhouses became less frequent and a small river crept up from around a nearby hill, and soon they entered the night's flowing, dark space.

The idyll ended just past a highway police station several kilometers from the next burg, when a car pulled in behind them abruptly enough that Kuryakin checked his speed to see if he wasn't violating the limit, but he wasn't. Then the car was very close, and the driver shifted his lights to a high beam so intense that Kuryakin could see their shadows on the dashboard, his knuckles on the steering wheel glaringly white. He was nearly blinded by his own mirrors, which he hastily adjusted.

He said, "What's with this guy?"

"See if he'll pass."

"If he's who we think he is, I don't think he will."

He softened his pressure on the gas pedal. For the usual motorist, easing the already modest speed would politely suggest that the driver might go by them. Kuryakin even hugged the shoulder, but the car remained glued to their bumper. There was something about this that reminded Kuryakin vaguely of his feeling of failure back in Berlin, with the shooting and later with the inability to reach headquarters, but he was unable to put his finger on it.

"Dammit," Dancer said. "Pull over."

Kuryakin moved off to the side of the road slowly and predictably, but although he had stopped, the incandescent globes persisted in their rearview mirror.

"This is not good," Dancer said.

"I would consider going back to speak to him, but this is not normal, not even for us."

Kuryakin put the car in gear again and pulled back onto the highway. The last reasonable thought he had was that he would proceed to the next town as though nothing were going on, and once they were back in civilization their tormentor's behavior would be visible to all, and they could, if necessary, simply drive to the police station with the offender in tow.

Their blinding, syncopated journey continued another kilometer before they reached a sweeping northward bend, closely guarded by hillside walls. They started passing scenic pulloffs, and Kuryakin estimated that the next curve was acute enough for a small lead to put him out of sight. As they entered a narrower roadway, Kuryakin pinned the accelerator, and they shot into the dark. Dancer grabbed the front edges of her seat and stared at the road twisting in front of them. She emitted something like a moan. Halfway around the curve, their tormentor vanished behind them, and although their car seemed only marginally under control, the absence of blinding light was a relief as they fled into darkness.

When they emerged and the road straightened, Kuryakin turned off his lights. He was going so fast he felt rattlebrained, but the road was visible under the stars, and he was able to brake hard and drop down into a scenic turnoff. Seconds later, their new friend shot past, lights blazing into nowhere. He was clearly determined to catch them: his progress up the road was rapid and increasingly erratic. They watched in fascination until the lights suddenly jerked sideways, shining in white cones across the river, turned downward, then disappeared.

Kuryakin heard Dancer say, in a tone of reasonable observation, "He went in."

Kuryakin had a strange feeling that took a long time to put into words, a mixture of relief, guilt, and cynicism. "Did I do that?"

Dancer shook her head, and Kuryakin pulled out onto the highway, his own headlights on once more. He drove in an odd, measured way, as if bound for an undesired destination, pulled along by something outside himself, thinking: betrayal, mistrust. They could see where the guy had gone through the guardrail. They pulled over and got out. Any hope they might have had for the driver was gone the minute they looked down from the riverbank. The car had broken through the ice and was submerged, its lights still burning freakishly, illuminating a bulge of crystalline water, a boulder in the exuberance of an ancient glacial watershed. Presently, the lights sank into blackness, and only the silver sheen of river in starlight remained. They had no choice but to climb back up to the roadway. At the next stop for gas, they switched seats, and Dancer drove off quietly.

An hour later, huge snowflakes, like confused moths, headed into the beams of their headlights and veered up at the last moment. The falling snow reminded Kuryakin of the street in Berlin with the Christmas shops and their mosaic-like ornaments of stained glass, the desolate street musician hoping for the drumming of a few cold coins in the blue case. Kuryakin soon fell into a slumber, and from slumber he settled into a deep and long sleep.

Dipping into his rather wild imagination, his sleep-starved brain concocted a rampageous dream that featured an outlandish Thrush scheme. The scheme involved snow globes; the glass orbs, about six or so inches in circumference, usually contain polyurethane-resin figures in idyllic scenes and, when shaken, fill up with plastic snowflakes and, when you wind a little crank on their base, out comes a tinkly rendition of "White Christmas." But the snow globe's in Kuryakin's dream were no ordinary snow globes. These snow globes were U.N.C.L.E. weapons and fiendish Thrush devices, snowy crystal balls delivered to the doorstep of Del Floria's tailor shop, rolled down the stairs of a brownstone apartment house, or discovered on the blizzard swept side of a Himalayan peak.

When Kuryakin found himself trapped inside one of the orbs, it took him a minute or two to discern that the snow was not falling around him but rather outside the thin skin of glass and that the glass was really the windshield separating a winter storm from the rank interior of a miserable sedan. In the seat next to his, the woman driving was unruffled. The little clock in the dashboard said it was 2:07.

The snow thickened around them. As it dashed into their headlights it flared like a spatter of sparks, swooped upward, vanished, and was replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush was continuously abundant. They met few other cars on the road now. The lights of farmhouses were blurred in the blizzard. The heater came on and served to emphasize their isolation. The arc of the windshield wipers narrowed with every swipe, until they stared into the storm through two mottled slits of cleared glass. The purr of the motor was drawing them forward into a closing trap.

Going down a hill past a cemetery, they skidded. Dancer fought the

wheel as the chassis slithered. They slipped safely to the bottom. A big truck like a fleeing house poured down past them and on toward Siverski, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked.

Dancer straightened the wheel, pressed on the gas, revving the engine, and pulled out. They began up the next hill. The car plowed upward some dozens of yards; when the wheels start spinning again Dancer shifted desperately down into third. The motor stalled. Dancer yanked out the emergency brake to hold them there on the hill. They were more than halfway up. The storm sank sighing into the silence of the motor. The motor restarted but the rear tires could not grip the snow; rather, the weighty old BMW slipped backwards toward the low cable fence that guarded the edge of the highway embankment. In the end there was nothing for Dancer to do but to open her door and, leaning out, using the pink glow of her taillights as her only guide, to back all the way down. Yet, though the momentum gathered this way carried them briskly into the lower part of the hill, they spun to a halt a little short of the straightaway at the bottom. Their previous tracks were dark ruts in their headlights.

Suddenly their heads cast shadows forward. A car behind them was coming down the hill. Its lights dilated, blazed like a shout, and away outward around them. Its chains slogging, it continued past them, took the steepest part of the hill, and gathering speed, vanished over the crest. Their own stalled headlights picked out the stamp of the crosslinks in its tracks. The sparkling of the snow was steady.

"We'll have to put on chains like that guy," Kuryakin told his partner.

"Did you notice the way that bastard didn't offer to give us a push?"

"How could you expect him to? He almost didn't make it himself. Besides, I'm not so sure I want anybody stopping for us."

A second time, Dancer opened her door and leaned out and guided the car backwards down the hill, the snow dyed rose by her taillights. A few flakes swirl in through the open door and pricked Kuryakin on the face and hands. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his parka.

Back at the bottom of the hill, they both got out. They opened the trunk and tried to jack up the car. They had no flashlight and nothing was easy. The snow at the side of the road was six inches deep and in trying to lift their tires clear of it they jacked the rear too high and the car toppled sideways and threw the jack upright, with shocking velocity, into the center of the road.

"Jesus," Dancer said, "this is a way to get killed."

She made no motion to retrieve the upright, and Kuryakin went to get it. Holding the notched bar in one hand, he looked along the side of the road for a rock to block the front tires but the snow concealed all such details of earth.

His partner stood staring up at the tops of pines that hovered like dark angels above them in the storm. Dancer's thought seemed to her partner to be describing wide circles, like a scouting buzzard, in the opaque mauve heaven above them. Now her thought returned to the problem underfoot and she addressed Kuryakin: "No chains. Pointless to do this. Let's try to drive out of this again."

They climbed back into the car, started the motor, and drove forward. But in the half-hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow had fallen and the packing action of traffic had utterly ceased. The rear tires kept slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield went furry and closed. Three times the BMW sloughed forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Dancer ground her foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swung the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There was a small depression just off the shoulder. Dancer shifted down to first gear and tried to lift out, but the snow held them fast in its phantom grip. They were hopelessly stuck. She switched off the motor.

"We'll have to walk," Kuryakin said. "We'll be okay. We'll make it. It's about three kilometers more; can you make it?"

"I'll have to," she said.

They walked in their own ruts up the hill. Kuryakin found it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Native Americans were said to have done. The wind kept tipping him. There was a screen of pines and though the wind was not powerful it yet had an insistence that penetrated the hair on his head and fingered the bone beneath. On the slope past the cemetery the pines faded away and the wind blew as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He became transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watched his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Siverski was so great that a kind of infinity seemed posited in which he enjoyed enormous leisure. He employed this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There was an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of - the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a foreign realm to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seemed to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his partner, now stumbling beside him and using Kuryakin's body as a shield against the wind, tugged like a lead weight at his sleeve and ducked her face into his shoulder and let out a long and low, almost inaudible, moan.

The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. He had sunk into the center of the bed. He looked for a clock; there was none. He closed his eyes to listen for voices, heard cups clinking at some distance, and slipped back into sleep.

When he awoke again the strangeness of it all - the house, the day so fair and sane in the wake of madness, the silence, inside and out (why had he not been wakened? what had happened to Dancer? what about Waverly and Solo and the Thrush stronghold in Berlin? Loveless?) - held him from falling back, and he arose and dressed as much as he could. His shoes and socks, set to dry on a radiator in the room, were still damp. The strange walls and hallways, demanding thought and courage at every turn, seemed to suck strength from his limbs. He located the washroom and splashed water on his face and ran a wet finger back and forth across his teeth. In bare feet he went down the stairs. They were carpeted with a fresh-napped beige strip held to place by a brass rod at the base of each riser.

A middle-aged woman came in from the front room wearing a pinned-up bandana and a plain blue dress. She had a white cup in her hand and, grinning so her gums flashed, hailed him with, _"Dobraya utra, gospodeen Kuryakin_." Her pronouncing his name behind the Russian made him completely welcome. She led him into the kitchen and in walking behind her he felt himself, to his surprise, her height, or even an inch taller. He sat at the little linoleum-topped kitchen table and she served him like a wife. She set before him a thick tumbler of orange juice whose translucence cast on the linoleum in sunlight an orange shadow like a thin slice of the anticipated taste. It was delicious for him to sit and sip and feel the warmth of the little house. The kitchen reminded him of the cramped and improvised space where his mother had made their meals.

" _Gdye zhe devushka?"_ he asked.

 _"Nye znayoo vot tak,"_ she said. " _Shto vy khotite zhe-Wheaties? Nyet, Rice Krispies? Yelnya, mozhet byit?"_

"Rice Krispies." A plain electric clock beneath the battered cabinets said 1:10. He asked, _"Shto otkhodil a devushka?_ April Dancer?"

"They took her."

"They?" Panic fluttered in his chest.

"They, _cheloveki_ ," she said, looking at him soberly. Then, smiling a little: "She say tell you not to worry and how her uncle come and take her with them. She is all right. She is smiling when they come." She paused. "Have you looked outdoors?" she asked, gazing toward the window above the sink.

"Sort of. It's stopped?"

"Twenty-six centimeters, the radio said. All the schools in the area have cancelled. Even the army does not practice today."

"I wonder if they're going to have swimming practice tonight."

She looked at him unsmilingly.

"In America, you see, they announce on television and radio the closings..."

"I'm not sure," she said, staring at him. She was really quite lovely, he thought, and so sad. "You must be dying to get to your home."

"I suppose so. It seems forever since I was home." He stopped, realized he had lost track. "Please, what day is it?"

"27. November. You were sleeping some days."

"Some days?"

"Your _gospasha_ Dancer, she must love you very much. She tell me you went through too much. She was very worried about you. She looked after you two days, then doctor came, your fever go."

The room was brilliant in the aftermath of the storm. He started to remember dreams, bent extensions backwards in time, like that of sticks thrust into water, of the last waking events - the final kilometer staggering through the unwinding storm; Dancer's beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and yelling and rubbing her hands together in desperation. His own blind numbness. Then this gracious woman, sad and alone, yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her unbound hair fanning over the shoulders of her brown bathrobe, her hands tucked in the sleeves, her arms hugging herself as she yawned. She put them in two tiny rooms in the back of the house, in small beds that smelled of feathers and starch, and for a while he kept tense. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond him seemed to explain everything, and he relaxed.

"Do you drink coffee?" she asked.

"I try to every morning but there's never any time. I'm being an awful lot of trouble." There were always innocent people. Ordinary angels swept up into these affairs. He wondered what danger they had put this poor woman in by their arrival at her house. Would Thrush be at her doorstep after he left, or KGB? Central Intelligence?

"Hush. It is no trouble."

He made bold to ask, "Did anybody act suspicious?"

"Suspicious?"

"Yes. Did anybody ask a lot of questions? Or look dangerous?"

"I do not know."

"Oh." He felt sorrow for bringing it up, but she seemed unruffled by the line of inquiry as she brought him a steaming cup of fragrant dark coffee. "Well, I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of that hill."

"The doctor said. He also said about a bad accident up the road. It is rumored another American go off the road and into the lake. He is under the ice now."

"These Rice Krispies are awfully good."

She looked up over her own cup of coffee in surprise and smiled. "They're just the ones that come out of the box." The sedan that drove him back into East Germany and then West Germany and West Berlin lapped up the kilometers - endlessly. There was snow everywhere. He always marveled when he was overwhelmed by the weather. The scientist in Kuryakin beheld the complexity of it all, the delicate net of interdependency. Another persona in Kuryakin loved winter, this beautiful and mysterious season, when heavy snow simplified many of the fascinating details seen during warmer seasons while yielding masterpieces of monumental sculptural forms in frozen landscapes. He remembered his appreciation as a boy growing up in Russia for the long-term responses and sacrifices each tree and bush had been obliged to make in order to survive. Paradoxically, and ultimately, however, he sensed in snowbound winters an abiding peace and tranquility suggesting that this was exactly how it was meant to be.

"I hope Mr. Waverly allows you a little more time in New York to recuperate," came April Dancer's voice through the phone at the Berlin airport. "Take some time for yourself, take in some jazz clubs, read those books you love so much."

She was quiet and confiding, but her voice took on a taunting edge when turning to the subject of the thugs who almost engulfed them both. "So Grieves wins," she said.

"Just this time."

"Grieves is on the loose. Maybe marketing his poison to so-called world leaders, people I wouldn't trust to lead me to a park bench, and Thrush is reaping the prize money."

"Has Central Intelligence told us anything about their man Loveless? About this poison, our cargo? Or the accident?"

"Mr. Waverly has a report on the substance. The CIA reports he arrived safely in D.C. yesterday. They say he infiltrated Thrush to retrieve the substance. Mr. Waverly has more details; basically, some U.S. Army experiment went sour in the early 1960s and Thrush stumbled on some leftovers."

"These damned governments," Kuryakin said, in half-jest.

"Another thing. Seems you've been officially exonerated."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't shoot Napoleon. It was Loveless. Some ploy to preserve his cover with Grieves, according to the CIA."

"Has anybody told Napoleon about this?"

"You haven't heard," she said softly.

The phone felt cold in his hand. "What? I thought you said he was okay, recovering in a Berlin hospital."

"Yes, doing remarkably well, as I understand. Should be home in a week or so, they say."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"Suspended from active duty. Indefinitely."

"This has to be a joke. What the devil for?"

"The official line is that Napoleon sold out to Grieves."

Kuryakin held the phone in silence. He could not bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it shied into distraction and confusion.

"This man, Loveless," Kuryakin said. "What did he do in the army?"

"Munitions expert."

"Of course," Kuryakin said, remembering the neatly prepared car bomb. "So, he gets away with shooting Napoleon and with almost killing me."

Kuryakin wanted to gut that sleaze, Loveless.

"Illya, Napoleon's out of the Command."

Waverly! What was that pedantic fool doing? He couldn't afford to lose his top enforcement agent. Not over this.

"He paid for your life, is what you're telling me," Kuryakin said.

"Yes. Loveless brokered some deal between Solo and Grieves. Grieves wanted me dead, wanted me tortured to death, as I understand."

"And the payment?"

"Napoleon authorized a transfer of his entire savings to an account in Switzerland under the name of Christopher Sly."

"A Grieves alias."

"We checked, and as of an hour after you and I arrived at the Russian border, the money was gone. $365,000. All of it."

"My God," Kuryakin muttered, bringing his hand up and pulling his bangs back severely from his clammy forehead. "So Mr. Waverly thinks he has a dirty cop on his hands."

"Well, the bad guy is out there running around with a lot of cold hard cash."

"But Napoleon saved your life."

Dancer spoke more calmly but with clear anger. "I'm tired of it all, Illya. If it's not Grieves, it's some other lunatic incarnation," she said. "They capture one of our agents, we kill two of theirs. We blow up one of their strongholds, and they find one of our labs. We've been fighting them for years and years, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. They're still plotting and planning, and we're still trying to stop them. What's the point?"

He heavily sat in the dark of the Pan-Am jumbo jet airliner and read from the little plastic seat rack _Reader's Digest_ s one after another. He read until he felt sick from reading. He eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: "Are We Ready to Disarm?" and "Ten Proofs that There is a God." He read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed. He found a tattered copy of Joseph Heller's beleaguered Catch-22, that crazy novel that so many school librarians in the early 1960s had been afraid of, and he felt sorry all over again for poor Yossarian, the bombadier stuck on that little part of Italy in the closing days of World War Two with all those people who wanted him dead.

The flight attendants fed him and put pillows under his head and took a blanket from a passenger ahead of him so he could be warm. His teeth had begun to chatter and he made no attempt to repress this odd skeletal vibration, which both released swarms of chill spirits with him and brought down from the lovely women helpless fluttery gusts of concern.

"Poor guy, he looks exhausted," one said.

"Keep an eye on him," another said.

To the tune of their retreating voices he fell asleep. His dreams did not embody them or April Dancer or Napoleon Solo or Mr. Waverly or Cornwell Grieves or Lancaster Loveless but seemed to take place in a sluggish whirling world that preceded them all and where only his mother's face, flashing by on the periphery with the startled fearful expression with which she used to call him down from a tree he was climbing, kept him company in the shifting rootless flux of unidentifiable things. His own voice throughout seemed to be raised in protest and when he awoke, with an urgent need to urinate, the attendants' voices seemed a grappling extension of his own. Sunlight the tone of lemon filled the frame of the small airplane window. He remembered that in the middle of his slumber he had almost surfaced from his exit-less nightmare at the touch of hands on his face and the sound of a woman's voice above his seat saying, "Poor sweet guy. I wish I could give him something to feel better."

Kuryakin looked out the Pan-Am jet window. In time New York City would appear in the frame, buildings like skeletal frames illuminated from within by yellow incandescence and from without by persistent and garish rainbows of neon. He knew what the scene would look like - a patch of the world he knew in 1971, the noisy life of New York City, frenetic pace of assignments for U.N.C.L.E. - and yet he did not know, was in his softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of dull shadow. Painters burned to paint such things these days, black squares on black squares, black lines slashing hard canvases. Then, he went weary and closed his eyes and nearly dozed, so that when the beautiful young flight attendant brought by his orange juice and cereal he ate with an unready mouth.

EPILOG: "Go, Bid the Soldiers Shoot."

 _Somewhere in New York City, U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters, the Middle of January 1972_

There were deep secrets being kept that disrupted the harmony and balance of his daily existence, making his life feel much more tenuous and complicated than it seemed on the surface. If the outcome of the mission in Russia had been anticlimactic and indeterminate, the debriefing portion was bloodless. He had spent the first week of December on mandatory leave, listening to jazz and having late and unhurried dinners in the Village; the rest of the month and into January he had spent working 18-hour days at headquarters in cold offices and conference rooms where he learned nothing.

And the moral of this story is...? he heard himself thinking. Solo, kicked out of the command. But, at least alive and well. Hibernating in his New York City apartment, nursing his wounded professional pride. Dancer was in England on a new assignment. But nobody seemed to know anything much about the creeps who had almost done them all in. Kuryakin kept remembering Dancer's anger over the phone in Berlin. What was the point, indeed?

There was a description of the cargo he and Dancer had transported for Grieves to the Russian border. The report came from U.N.C.L.E. analysts but even this was only historical background: Few people know that, early in the 1960s, U.S. Army scientists stumbled upon a deadly biological weapon that certain figures in the U.S. government believed would help make wars more humane. Predicated on the malaria virus, the material possesses a nauseating and penetrating odor and is so poisonous that exposure to it put many of the Army's best scientists in the hospital for a few days. If a man goes to a hospital suffering from a biological or chemical gas, he is as useless as if he were dead - and to care for him several other persons must be kept out of the battle lines. The chances are that the victim will recover. When the U.S. Army determined the substance was too dangerous to handle, they dumped their supply into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Germany. The whole matter was nicknamed The Geranium Experiment when it was discovered that the substance blossomed into bright and beautiful flower-like shapes when it hit the water.

Kuryakin had imagined briefly the back of the Mercedes trunk filling up with giant frozen geraniums of purple and green and blue.

Kuryakin found relative solace in the underground range and armory. Unused weapons of all makes, types, and sizes filled the amazing treasure trove of a store, and he produced for himself one of the old Mausers, still in its original box, thick with grease and wrapped in orange wax paper. No mean feat, as this particular gun had long since been removed from U.N.C.L.E.'s regular issue. A 1934 7.65-mm German Mauser. An original model with a wooden grip on the extended barrel. A conversion design similar to a Stoner 63 system the U.S. Marines had tested in the Far East.

Unlike the Walther P-38-style U.N.C.L.E. Special that could be fired all day without heating up, this gun could get hot after a few rounds and it also tended to jam. But to Kuryakin there was kind of poetic reward in reaching back into history with the old piece.

Alone he fired away at the black silhouettes. He thought about Grieves, or more precisely what he had seen the other day. A round head, from the back, unmistakably that of Grieves. Bouncing away from him in a sea of faces. Kuryakin had given chase. His vision jiggled as he pushed past shoppers and businessmen. Then a little old woman screamed as he ran past, almost knocking her down, and Grieves was gone.

He fired away with a mixture of ferocity and concentration that left him exhausted but not at peace. Kuryakin was not pleased at the prospect of pursing the loose ends of this case through the freezing streets and into the unspeakable hideaways of New York City. Under a causeway while a cold, dark rain falls. Not pleased. Could he pull himself together or not? As an agent, he longed for a time when he could relax, shed the paranoia, and yet it was true that his life had no meaning without dangerous work.

He heard himself speaking about all of this to Napoleon Solo with the exaggerated calm of a man trying to survive at the eye of a storm. Solo, armored with a thick beard and the suggestion of a heavy new gut, drank his beer quietly.

"Relax. On the balance I'd say things turned out okay," Solo said with a wry smile. "Everybody came out alive. And I hear you've been exonerated."

"Yes, well, I can't quite get over this new feeling of being a solid citizen again," Kuryakin said.

"If it helps any, I'll always think of you as disreputable."

The place was full and they sat in a dark corner. When Kuryakin looked at their images reversed in the big plate window, he wondered about these two men, two aging agents who might be just barely holding on to sanity and to the tender altruistic feelings that they thought redeemed their violence.

"You'll lose your disguise, I trust," Kuryakin said, smiling weakly as he turned his attention back to Solo.

"Of course. I got a call. I've been activated."

"Waverly?"

"Will wonders never cease?"

"So, the dirty cop gets thrown off the force but is brought back to solve a mysterious case."

Solo smiled, almost serenely. "Something like that."

"This has not been an easy one."

"On the contrary. I'd say it's been more of the same. Another blood-soaked, hellish experience. A midnight special for lovers of violent causes."

"I thought I saw him yesterday."

"Loveless?"

"No. Grieves."

"Here?"

"Yes. Not far from headquarters. Waverly's got eyes out all over the place for him."

"We have to get my money back, if nothing else. Save, Illya. Save for a warm place to die. I've always said that. Don't touch it for anybody. Not anybody."

"Not even if it means saving the life of a friend?"

There was a silence between the two men as they ate and drank. Then Kuryakin said quietly, "We need to get Loveless, too. If he's not already dead. I swear to heaven, Napoleon, I want to gut the man. Him and Grieves both." Solo said nothing and took another sip of his beer, gazed steadily over the rim of his glass into Kuryakin's face. Kuryakin continued, "How could Loveless be so...?"

Solo paused above the beer, waiting, then supplied the word: "Ruthless?"

Kuryakin grinned a bit sheepishly. "Ruthless Loveless. Yes, well, I did ask for that one."

But Solo wasn't smiling. "I honestly don't know. He was a friend. Obviously he's one of those who believes in the mission above all else."

"There has to be more."

Solo finished the beer. "Don't worry. We'll tie things up. I don't think this is over."

They finished in silence and then left.

The afternoon was clear and cold and the sun above the westward section of town made their shadows long before them.

"None of this is ever over, is it?" Kuryakin said weakly.

Solo hailed a cab from down the street. But for a minute longer the two agents stood together at the curb, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. With a yank that made the door screech, Solo pulled open the back door of the cab and held it for the friend who would join him for the ride to a tailor shop on a block of humble brownstones. It was a maze, behind that little shop.

The End


End file.
